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Is sociopathy an illness? We often think so … to the point that the word “sick” has taken on a strange secondary meaning. If we call a ruthless, self-seeking person “sick,” we mean he should be shunned at all costs. We don’t mean he should take an aspirin and get some rest.

Sociopathy doesn’t look like a mental illness, being much less incapacitating than schizophrenia and most mental disorders. A sociopath can deal with other people well enough, perhaps too well. As Harpending and Sobus (2015) point out:

It is a psychopathology because of what sociopaths do to us, and it has significant legal, political, and moral consequences for all of us. Most criminals are probably sociopaths according to some definition (the figure of 80% is often quoted).

Sociopaths regularly present the following characteristics:

onset before age 15, childhood hyperactivity, truancy, delinquency, disruption in school

early and often aggressive sexual activity, marital histories of desertion, non-support, abandonment

persistent lying, cheating, irresponsibility without visible shame

sudden changes of plan, impulsiveness, unpredictability

charm and a façade of sensitivity

high mobility, vagrancy, use of aliases

Sociopaths follow a life strategy that is adaptive for themselves but ruinous for society. Harpending and Sobus (2015) argue that they succeed so well because they know how to manipulate social relationships to their advantage.

Sociopathy is at least moderately heritable (Hicks et al., 2004). Interestingly, it seems to cluster with hysteria in first-degree relatives, with sociopathy being expressed in the males and hysteria in the females. Harpending and Sobus (2015) argue that “hysteria is the expression in females of the same genetic material that leads to sociopathy in males.” In short, “sociopathy in females is the result of a greater dose of the genetic material that leads, in smaller doses, to hysteria, namely, hysteria is mild sociopathy.”

If sociopathy is adaptive, why does it affect only a minority of us? It seems that the rest of us have developed counter-strategies of looking for signs of sociopathy and expelling suspects from society … and the gene pool. This is probably why sociopaths tend to be always on the move—if they stay too long with the same people, they risk being detected and dealt with.

Gene-culture coevolution

We adapt to our cultural environment as we do to our natural environment. More so in fact. The last 10,000 years have seen far more genetic change in our ancestors than the previous 100,000, this speeding up of evolution being driven by the entry of humans into an increasingly diverse range of cultural environments.

Sociopathy may thus propagate itself more easily in some cultures than in others, with the result that its incidence may likewise differ from one to another. In a small band of hunter-gatherers, a sociopath will not last long because he is always interacting with the same small group of people:

In a 1976 study anthropologist Jane M. Murphy, then at Harvard University found that an isolated group of Yupik-speaking Inuits near the Bering Strait had a term (kunlangeta) they used to describe “a man who … repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and … takes sexual advantage of many women—someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment.” When Murphy asked an Inuit what the group would typically do with a kunlangeta, he replied, “Somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking.”(Lilienfeld and Arkowitz, 2007)

In a larger community, a sociopath may evade detection long enough to reproduce successfully and pass on his mental traits. Finally, in some cultures he can use his manipulative skills to dominate the community, becoming a “big man” and enjoying very good opportunities for reproduction.

This Pandora’s Box was opened when humans gave up hunting and gathering and became farmers. First, farming supported a much larger population, so it became easier for sociopaths to move about from one group of unsuspecting people to another. Second, farming created a food surplus that powerful individuals could use to support underlings of various sorts: servants, soldiers, scribes, etc. There was thus a growing class of people who did not directly support themselves and whose existence depended on their ability to manipulate others.

Finally, in the tropical zone, farming greatly increased female reproductive autonomy. Through year-round farming, women could provide for themselves and their children with less male assistance. Men accordingly shifted their reproductive strategy from monogamy to polygyny, i.e., from providing for a wife and children to inseminating as many women as possible. This kind of cultural environment selected for male seducers and manipulators rather than male providers. Conversely, it selected for women who feel only an intermittent need for male companionship and who from time to time are able to coax assistance from people who are not so inclined:

Ethnographic descriptions of women who live in social contexts of low male parental investment portray women who are very demanding. Young women demand help from kin on behalf of children. When the help is not forthcoming the mothers often summarily dump or deposit the child or children at the door of a relative who (in their judgment) will not turn the children away. Women demand gifts from boyfriends for themselves.(Harpending and Draper, 1988)

In women, this selection pressure favors a condition known medically as Briquet’s syndrome and more commonly as “hysteria”:

When males are not good risks for parental investment, females will adjust their behavior accordingly. A common clinical characterization of Briquet’s syndrome is a woman who exaggerates need, who demands high levels of attention and investment, who deceives herself and others as to her requirements. The strategy (learned or inherited) makes sense for a woman with high exposure to low investment males. These males, however, are so fickle and so mobile that they can be dunned only in the short run.(Harpending and Draper, 1988)

Sociopathic behavior, be it hysteria or full-blown sociopathy, is not favored in hunter-gatherers, since both sexes invest heavily in their offspring and in each other. The selection is for men and women who can bond strongly with one partner:

[...] abandonment of the pair bond by either partner is likely to be deadly for the offspring. Draper (manuscript) finds that men with more children spend more time hunting than men with fewer dependents; that is to say that more offspring are directly translated into more parental work for the male. Pennington and Harpending (manuscript) found that infant mortality among women who had more than one mate during their reproductive careers was nearly twice as great as infant mortality of women who had only one husband. [...] In societies of this type the contexts for the anti-social trait are unfavorable. There will be no pay-offs for anti-social behavior and the bearer of the trait will be readily detected and ostracized. (Harpending and Draper, 1988)

Strategy and counter-strategy

Sociopathy is therefore not an illness but a strategy. It has been least successful in small societies where both sexes invest heavily in care for their partners and offspring. It has been more successful in larger societies, particularly those where men invest less in partners and offspring. Indeed, because sociopathy does so well in such contexts, it may have hindered the development of larger and more complex societies.

In most large societies, people seek out and expel sociopaths from their local kin group and treat everyone else with suspicion. The result is the “amoral familialism” we see throughout much of the world. People prefer to deal with relatives, hire only relatives for their businesses and, as a rule, act morally only towards relatives. Thus, the high-trust environment of the family cannot extend to society in general. Among other things, this is why the market economy has failed to develop spontaneously over most of the world and over most of history. Without strong-armed government intervention (military pacification, police, courts, etc.), markets remain marketplaces—places of exchange that are highly localized in space and time. The market principle cannot spread to most economic transactions.

Some humans have resolved this problem by freeing themselves from the straitjacket of kinship, by adhering to social rules that apply to everyone, and by ruthlessly expelling rule breakers wherever they may be. This is the adaptation that Europeans have developed to the north and west of the Hajnal line. The relative weakness of kinship ties and, correspondingly, the relative strength of individualism favored a complex of psychological traits that may be summarized as follows:

- capacity to internalize punishment for disobedience of social rules (guilt proneness).

- capacity to simulate and then transfer to oneself the emotional states of other people, especially when such people are affected by rule-breaking either by oneself or by others (affective empathy).

- tendency to frame moral rules in universal, absolute terms, i.e., moral universalism and moral absolutism, as opposed to situational morality based on kinship. Rule-breakers are likewise condemned in absolute terms and may be expelled from the entire community, as opposed to being ostracized by close kin.

The above mental package brought Northwest Europeans closer than other humans to the threshold where one could escape the limitations of kinship and organize society along other lines, notably the market economy, the modern State, and political ideology. It thus became possible to meet the challenge of creating larger societies while ensuring compliance with social rules and a high degree of personal autonomy.

Oh it is very clear that a century or so ago if a man did not make some effort to support his family then his children would be subject to very high mortality. Nowadays some males in the inner cities have innumerable children that they do nothing for and of whom they may not know they exist. But thanks to the modern welfare state their children's chances of survival to reproductive age are little different from those of the children of "helicopter" parents.

The welfare state probably hasn't existed long enough yet to have had much genetic effect. But if the welfare state can be sustained then obviously over time it will select for a relatively low degree of parental investment, particularly on the part of men.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giacomo_Casanova Prince Charles de Ligne, who understood Casanova well, and who knew most of the prominent individuals of the age, thought Casanova the most interesting man he had ever met: “there is nothing in the world of which he is not capable.” Rounding out the portrait, the Prince also stated:
The only things about which he knows nothing are those which he believes himself to be expert: the rules of the dance, the French language, good taste, the way of the world, savoir vivre. It is only his comedies which are not funny, only his philosophical works which lack philosophy—all the rest are filled with it; there is always something weighty, new, piquant, profound. He is a well of knowledge, but he quotes Homer and Horace ad nauseam. His wit and his sallies are like Attic salt. He is sensitive and generous, but displease him in the slightest and he is unpleasant, vindictive, and detestable. He believes in nothing except what is most incredible, being superstitious about everything. He loves and lusts after everything. … He is proud because he is nothing. … Never tell him you have heard the story he is going to tell you. … Never omit to greet him in passing, for the merest trifle will make him your enemy.[111]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexy_son_hypothesis The sexy son hypothesis in evolutionary biology and sexual selection — proposed by Ronald Fisher in 1930 — states that a female’s ideal mate choice among potential mates is one whose genes will produce male offspring with the best chance of reproductive success and implies that a potential mate’s capacity as a parental caregiver or any other direct benefits the father can offer the mother such as nuptial gifts, or good territory are irrelevant to his value as the potential father of the female’s offspring. Fisher’s principle means that the sex ratio (except in certain eusocial insects) is always 1:1 between males and females, yet what matters most are her “sexy sons”‘ future breeding successes, more likely if they have a promiscuous father, in creating large numbers of offspring carrying copies of her genes

This sounds like a rationale for seeing dastardly behaviour as a feature not a bug; girls prefer boys who will use and dump, because sons fathered by such young men will be sexual tyrannosauruses spreading the mother’s genes.

Yes, but on the other hand in a primitive society dependent mostly on hunting the survival of a women and her children is totally dependent on the willingness and ability of her mate to provide food. An Eskimo women who choose a mate for her children who was either unwilling or unable to provide her with food was doomed as soon as winter arrived.

Second, the Western concept of psychopathy is based on one type of individual with a paticular configuration of traits. When you examine that one type, and assume that type exists in isolation, then it sure does seem like an odd feature that needs explanation.

But in reality, as you pointed out in your earlier post, psychopathic traits exist on a continuum. That is, the Dark Triad (Tetrad). Psychopathy is continuously distributed in the population just like other personality traits. Its selection is hence similar in nature to selection for all the other dimensions of personality.

As well, as I argue in my post above, psychopathic traits vary across populations. Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin. The “loner” psychopath (as opposed to one bound to kin) as described in this peice is probably more a Western phenomenon.

I have to disagree with Harpending and Sobus on one thing: this type of psychopathy would never have been adaptive in women. There is simply no female equivalent to male “cheater” strategies that would have been effective in the long run because of the high investment women need to make in their offspring. This too is a consequence of looking at things through a NW European lens.

In reality, the existence of psychopathic traits in women (beyond the normal distrubution of personality or more clannish traits) is probably a result of sexual antagonistic selection, if anything. Indeed, many masculine features in women are the result of such, I suspect:

Sociopathy doesn’t look like a mental illness, being much less incapacitating than schizophrenia and most mental disorders. A sociopath can deal with other people well enough, perhaps too well.

In any case, I will discuss this in a future post on features and bugs in human psychology. Psychopathy is clearly an evolved trait, the result of selection – a feature – working as it should. By contrast, autism, schizophrenia, and the like are bugs; they are the result of something that is “broken” and are always being selected against.

Obligate male sexuality is also very much a bug: it is a mental illness that’s always detrimental to fitness. Yet the DSM regards psychopathy as a disorder and homosexuality as not a disorder – brilliant… :\

In a small band of hunter-gatherers, a sociopath will not last long because he is always interacting with the same small group of people

I wonder about that. Are historically foraging indigenous American populations devoid of psychopathic traits – like say the Inuit?

Look, everyone knows that personality disorders represent extreme ends of continua. You think that's a new insight because you are an ignoramus regarding the field of psychiatry. (Your readiness to have strong opinions about matters you know little about explains your intolerance of self-important ignorance when it intrudes on your small domain of competence.)

You (stupidly) fail even to understand what Frost contends. (Assuming these ideas are original, this posting of his is sheer brilliance.) He's not trying to "explain" psychopathy as an isolated type. He's explaining why the rate of psychopathy can vary due to gene-culture co-evolution.

Homosexuality may be a "disorder," but it no longer bothers most people in the West or is considered horrible. Not so with sociopaths. (I have a brother who is a classic sociopath, so I know) . I don't want to have biological children or be involved with a woman, so being gay is no skin off my nose. The troublesome part of it is being hated so much by some people.

Ordinary Westerners have been indoctrinated for several decades now to believe that there are no such things as out-groups and non-kin:

http://www.unz.com/isteve/white-debt/

They think and behave differently when they believe otherwise, as can be seen in history or in contemporary Westerners who were formerly liberal until they became acquainted with HBD or racialist literature.

I have to disagree with Harpending and Sobus on one thing: this type of psychopathy would never have been adaptive in women.

Are you saying hysteria is not adaptive in women? I've previously read in other places about the genetic connection between hysteria and psychopathy, with the idea that the former is the female version of the latter. Of course, the modern day term for hysteria is "borderline personality disorder".

As a layman with no specialist knowledge, I found this article extremely interesting and explanatory. It would help to explain, for instance, how the USA - most of whose people are socially admirable, moral, and friendly - seems to have acquired a leadership class composed almost exclusively of sociopaths. As well as being a very large nation, the USA is perhaps the first example of a "synthetic" nation with virtually no traditional native population. As well as the "melting pot" ideal, there are the cultural ideals such as the Protestant work ethic and the worship of money and success - all tailor-made for the mass production of sociopaths.

Another interesting point is the thought that primitive groups, who cooperate closely within the group and who efficiently identify and expel or destroy sociopaths, make up for this by behaving "sociopathically" as a group towards out-groups and individuals. I remember Jared Diamond writing that, less than a century ago, anyone travelling more than a few miles away from his home village in New Guinea would almost certainly be killed by the inhabitants of the next village. To them, any outsider was more likely than not to be dangerous, so the safest thing was to kill him right away.

So is the real question how big and how coherent our in-group is? Modern civilization attempts to dissolve traditional small-group loyalties and make us all good citizens of the state. But is the cost that we start to regard everyone else as out-group members?

As well, as I argue in my post above, psychopathic traits vary across populations. Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin. The “loner” psychopath (as opposed to one bound to kin) as described in this peice is probably more a Western phenomenon.

JayMan,

How would you define psychopathy and clannishness here? Would you regard someone who discriminates against you as being psychopathic and or clannish?

There are plenty of sociopaths among indigenous Americans. The flip side of the social mechanisms for dealing with sociopaths within small groups of hunter-gatherers might be a heightened degree of amoral familialism within such groups. Much of modern tribal politics is infused with amoral familialism writ large. If the consequences of sociopathy can be mitigated or externalized by the tribe - for example by putting their sociopaths in a warrior caste - it might be a trait that can be used. We need no reminder that some hunter-gatherer tribe were very warlike.

Second, the Western concept of psychopathy is based on one type of individual with a paticular configuration of traits. When you examine that one type, and assume that type exists in isolation, then it sure does seem like an odd feature that needs explanation.

But in reality, as you pointed out in your earlier post, psychopathic traits exist on a continuum. That is, the Dark Triad (Tetrad). Psychopathy is continuously distributed in the population just like other personality traits. Its selection is hence similar in nature to selection for all the other dimensions of personality.

As well, as I argue in my post above, psychopathic traits vary across populations. Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin. The "loner" psychopath (as opposed to one bound to kin) as described in this peice is probably more a Western phenomenon.

I have to disagree with Harpending and Sobus on one thing: this type of psychopathy would never have been adaptive in women. There is simply no female equivalent to male "cheater" strategies that would have been effective in the long run because of the high investment women need to make in their offspring. This too is a consequence of looking at things through a NW European lens.

In reality, the existence of psychopathic traits in women (beyond the normal distrubution of personality or more clannish traits) is probably a result of sexual antagonistic selection, if anything. Indeed, many masculine features in women are the result of such, I suspect:

Sociopathy doesn't look like a mental illness, being much less incapacitating than schizophrenia and most mental disorders. A sociopath can deal with other people well enough, perhaps too well.

In any case, I will discuss this in a future post on features and bugs in human psychology. Psychopathy is clearly an evolved trait, the result of selection – a feature – working as it should. By contrast, autism, schizophrenia, and the like are bugs; they are the result of something that is "broken" and are always being selected against.

Obligate male sexuality is also very much a bug: it is a mental illness that's always detrimental to fitness. Yet the DSM regards psychopathy as a disorder and homosexuality as not a disorder – brilliant... :\

In a small band of hunter-gatherers, a sociopath will not last long because he is always interacting with the same small group of people

I wonder about that. Are historically foraging indigenous American populations devoid of psychopathic traits – like say the Inuit?

A book of Carlton Coon told the story of a whaling ship’s black cook put ashore in Inuit territory to spend a few weeks making molasses, he impregnated a quarter of the women in the district.

Eysenck found the greatest predictor of psychopathy was ticking the box for “my mother is not a good person”.

Apart from sociopathy as an adaption where an individual exploits the vulnerabilities of others in his own group, could there also be entire groups who have evolved sociopathic strategies to exploit the vulnerabilities of a larger group whose society they live within as a minority?

Second, the Western concept of psychopathy is based on one type of individual with a paticular configuration of traits. When you examine that one type, and assume that type exists in isolation, then it sure does seem like an odd feature that needs explanation.

But in reality, as you pointed out in your earlier post, psychopathic traits exist on a continuum. That is, the Dark Triad (Tetrad). Psychopathy is continuously distributed in the population just like other personality traits. Its selection is hence similar in nature to selection for all the other dimensions of personality.

As well, as I argue in my post above, psychopathic traits vary across populations. Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin. The "loner" psychopath (as opposed to one bound to kin) as described in this peice is probably more a Western phenomenon.

I have to disagree with Harpending and Sobus on one thing: this type of psychopathy would never have been adaptive in women. There is simply no female equivalent to male "cheater" strategies that would have been effective in the long run because of the high investment women need to make in their offspring. This too is a consequence of looking at things through a NW European lens.

In reality, the existence of psychopathic traits in women (beyond the normal distrubution of personality or more clannish traits) is probably a result of sexual antagonistic selection, if anything. Indeed, many masculine features in women are the result of such, I suspect:

Sociopathy doesn't look like a mental illness, being much less incapacitating than schizophrenia and most mental disorders. A sociopath can deal with other people well enough, perhaps too well.

In any case, I will discuss this in a future post on features and bugs in human psychology. Psychopathy is clearly an evolved trait, the result of selection – a feature – working as it should. By contrast, autism, schizophrenia, and the like are bugs; they are the result of something that is "broken" and are always being selected against.

Obligate male sexuality is also very much a bug: it is a mental illness that's always detrimental to fitness. Yet the DSM regards psychopathy as a disorder and homosexuality as not a disorder – brilliant... :\

In a small band of hunter-gatherers, a sociopath will not last long because he is always interacting with the same small group of people

I wonder about that. Are historically foraging indigenous American populations devoid of psychopathic traits – like say the Inuit?

Look, everyone knows that personality disorders represent extreme ends of continua. You think that’s a new insight because you are an ignoramus regarding the field of psychiatry. (Your readiness to have strong opinions about matters you know little about explains your intolerance of self-important ignorance when it intrudes on your small domain of competence.)

You (stupidly) fail even to understand what Frost contends. (Assuming these ideas are original, this posting of his is sheer brilliance.) He’s not trying to “explain” psychopathy as an isolated type. He’s explaining why the rate of psychopathy can vary due to gene-culture co-evolution.

Second, the Western concept of psychopathy is based on one type of individual with a paticular configuration of traits. When you examine that one type, and assume that type exists in isolation, then it sure does seem like an odd feature that needs explanation.

But in reality, as you pointed out in your earlier post, psychopathic traits exist on a continuum. That is, the Dark Triad (Tetrad). Psychopathy is continuously distributed in the population just like other personality traits. Its selection is hence similar in nature to selection for all the other dimensions of personality.

As well, as I argue in my post above, psychopathic traits vary across populations. Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin. The "loner" psychopath (as opposed to one bound to kin) as described in this peice is probably more a Western phenomenon.

I have to disagree with Harpending and Sobus on one thing: this type of psychopathy would never have been adaptive in women. There is simply no female equivalent to male "cheater" strategies that would have been effective in the long run because of the high investment women need to make in their offspring. This too is a consequence of looking at things through a NW European lens.

In reality, the existence of psychopathic traits in women (beyond the normal distrubution of personality or more clannish traits) is probably a result of sexual antagonistic selection, if anything. Indeed, many masculine features in women are the result of such, I suspect:

Sociopathy doesn't look like a mental illness, being much less incapacitating than schizophrenia and most mental disorders. A sociopath can deal with other people well enough, perhaps too well.

In any case, I will discuss this in a future post on features and bugs in human psychology. Psychopathy is clearly an evolved trait, the result of selection – a feature – working as it should. By contrast, autism, schizophrenia, and the like are bugs; they are the result of something that is "broken" and are always being selected against.

Obligate male sexuality is also very much a bug: it is a mental illness that's always detrimental to fitness. Yet the DSM regards psychopathy as a disorder and homosexuality as not a disorder – brilliant... :\

In a small band of hunter-gatherers, a sociopath will not last long because he is always interacting with the same small group of people

I wonder about that. Are historically foraging indigenous American populations devoid of psychopathic traits – like say the Inuit?

Homosexuality may be a “disorder,” but it no longer bothers most people in the West or is considered horrible. Not so with sociopaths. (I have a brother who is a classic sociopath, so I know) . I don’t want to have biological children or be involved with a woman, so being gay is no skin off my nose. The troublesome part of it is being hated so much by some people.

Second, the Western concept of psychopathy is based on one type of individual with a paticular configuration of traits. When you examine that one type, and assume that type exists in isolation, then it sure does seem like an odd feature that needs explanation.

But in reality, as you pointed out in your earlier post, psychopathic traits exist on a continuum. That is, the Dark Triad (Tetrad). Psychopathy is continuously distributed in the population just like other personality traits. Its selection is hence similar in nature to selection for all the other dimensions of personality.

As well, as I argue in my post above, psychopathic traits vary across populations. Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin. The "loner" psychopath (as opposed to one bound to kin) as described in this peice is probably more a Western phenomenon.

I have to disagree with Harpending and Sobus on one thing: this type of psychopathy would never have been adaptive in women. There is simply no female equivalent to male "cheater" strategies that would have been effective in the long run because of the high investment women need to make in their offspring. This too is a consequence of looking at things through a NW European lens.

In reality, the existence of psychopathic traits in women (beyond the normal distrubution of personality or more clannish traits) is probably a result of sexual antagonistic selection, if anything. Indeed, many masculine features in women are the result of such, I suspect:

Sociopathy doesn't look like a mental illness, being much less incapacitating than schizophrenia and most mental disorders. A sociopath can deal with other people well enough, perhaps too well.

In any case, I will discuss this in a future post on features and bugs in human psychology. Psychopathy is clearly an evolved trait, the result of selection – a feature – working as it should. By contrast, autism, schizophrenia, and the like are bugs; they are the result of something that is "broken" and are always being selected against.

Obligate male sexuality is also very much a bug: it is a mental illness that's always detrimental to fitness. Yet the DSM regards psychopathy as a disorder and homosexuality as not a disorder – brilliant... :\

In a small band of hunter-gatherers, a sociopath will not last long because he is always interacting with the same small group of people

I wonder about that. Are historically foraging indigenous American populations devoid of psychopathic traits – like say the Inuit?

Ordinary Westerners have been indoctrinated for several decades now to believe that there are no such things as out-groups and non-kin:

They think and behave differently when they believe otherwise, as can be seen in history or in contemporary Westerners who were formerly liberal until they became acquainted with HBD or racialist literature.

Second, the Western concept of psychopathy is based on one type of individual with a paticular configuration of traits. When you examine that one type, and assume that type exists in isolation, then it sure does seem like an odd feature that needs explanation.

But in reality, as you pointed out in your earlier post, psychopathic traits exist on a continuum. That is, the Dark Triad (Tetrad). Psychopathy is continuously distributed in the population just like other personality traits. Its selection is hence similar in nature to selection for all the other dimensions of personality.

As well, as I argue in my post above, psychopathic traits vary across populations. Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin. The "loner" psychopath (as opposed to one bound to kin) as described in this peice is probably more a Western phenomenon.

I have to disagree with Harpending and Sobus on one thing: this type of psychopathy would never have been adaptive in women. There is simply no female equivalent to male "cheater" strategies that would have been effective in the long run because of the high investment women need to make in their offspring. This too is a consequence of looking at things through a NW European lens.

In reality, the existence of psychopathic traits in women (beyond the normal distrubution of personality or more clannish traits) is probably a result of sexual antagonistic selection, if anything. Indeed, many masculine features in women are the result of such, I suspect:

Sociopathy doesn't look like a mental illness, being much less incapacitating than schizophrenia and most mental disorders. A sociopath can deal with other people well enough, perhaps too well.

In any case, I will discuss this in a future post on features and bugs in human psychology. Psychopathy is clearly an evolved trait, the result of selection – a feature – working as it should. By contrast, autism, schizophrenia, and the like are bugs; they are the result of something that is "broken" and are always being selected against.

Obligate male sexuality is also very much a bug: it is a mental illness that's always detrimental to fitness. Yet the DSM regards psychopathy as a disorder and homosexuality as not a disorder – brilliant... :\

In a small band of hunter-gatherers, a sociopath will not last long because he is always interacting with the same small group of people

I wonder about that. Are historically foraging indigenous American populations devoid of psychopathic traits – like say the Inuit?

I have to disagree with Harpending and Sobus on one thing: this type of psychopathy would never have been adaptive in women.

Are you saying hysteria is not adaptive in women? I’ve previously read in other places about the genetic connection between hysteria and psychopathy, with the idea that the former is the female version of the latter. Of course, the modern day term for hysteria is “borderline personality disorder”.

But how far does it take us that we know that psychopathy isn’t a disease? There are other classifications that it might fall under. Very low IQ is an adaptation rather than a disase, but we recognize it as disabling. Perhaps sociopathy should be recognized as a disability.

On another point – the proposed version 5 of the DSM reduces the ten old personality disorders to five categories, of which one is anti-social/psychopathy, featuring grandiosity and lack of empathy. The old histrionic personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder seem to fit. Where the hysteric is the model of borderline female psychopathy, I suspect the narcissist is the model of the borderline male psychopath. (No reference to borderline personality disorder intended.)

Look, everyone knows that personality disorders represent extreme ends of continua. You think that's a new insight because you are an ignoramus regarding the field of psychiatry. (Your readiness to have strong opinions about matters you know little about explains your intolerance of self-important ignorance when it intrudes on your small domain of competence.)

You (stupidly) fail even to understand what Frost contends. (Assuming these ideas are original, this posting of his is sheer brilliance.) He's not trying to "explain" psychopathy as an isolated type. He's explaining why the rate of psychopathy can vary due to gene-culture co-evolution.

Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia aren't termed personality disoders, which are persistent from childhood. Personality disorders are a subset of psychiatric disorders, and they're scored on a separate axis from that of the principal diagnosis, such as schizophrenia.

Can you speak to this study (http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/716875) which claims that strong performance in school is modestly correlated to bipolar disorder later in life? It would seem to suggest bipolar disorder may be adaptive some way. I once read that bipolar is more common in populations adapted to long winters, but I'm pretty sure that's BS given the data at the World Health Organization, which shows similar prevalence levels across the world. Also, what do you think of the current way bipolar is diagnosed along a spectrum, which includes both type 1 and 2 versions of the disorder? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_spectrum_diagnostic_scale)

Also, schizophrenia presents itself in many milder forms, including schizotypal, schizoid, schizophreniform, etc. I'm not sure if these milder forms of the disease are adaptive at all, but sometimes those with these mild versions are highly successful (particularly in artistic fields).

Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia aren’t termed personality disoders, which are persistent from childhood. Personality disorders are a subset of psychiatric disorders, and they’re scored on a separate axis from that of the principal diagnosis, such as schizophrenia.

Emblematic says,”…could there also be entire groups who have evolved sociopathic strategies to exploit the vulnerabilities of a larger group whose society they live within as a minority?”

The Jews are a tribe of psychopaths. No all maybe not even the majority but a large number. All of the Jews ancient writings are nothing more than a manual for psychopaths to live by. The Talmud is nothing but one psychopathic thought after another. The Talmud “great enlightenment” basically says that everyone not Jewish is there to serve Jews. All their property is really the Jews. No one is really human unless they’re Jews and their lives don’t matter. A psychopathic religion for a psychopathic people.

They’ve been thrown out of every single country that they’ve been to in any numbers. Psychopaths having no empathy themselves can only go by the feedback they get from the people they are exploiting. So they push and push to see what they can get away with. The normal people build up resentment towards them. Thinking “surely they will reform or repent” like a normal person who does wrong. Of course the Jews do not. They don’t have the mental process for reform. Then in a huge mass outpouring of hate for the Jews, fed up with the refusal to reform their behavior, they attack and/or deport them. In this stage of the cycle the Big/Rich Jews escape and the little Jews are attacked.

Start over.

Henry Kissinger’s quote, “Any people who have been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong”.

Here's a little hypothetical prediction: If we developed a perfect brain scan test for psychopathy and subjected CEOs and politicians and other "elites" to it, we'd identify many of the gentiles and few of the jews as psychopaths.

Maybe it helps to think of Bernie Madoff. He may be a psychopath. He scammed fellow Jews. Most Jews don't do that... because they're not psychopaths.

Some aspects of modern western society suit the lifestyle of a mobile sociopath, but others present significant obstacles.

More casual social mores and weaker family ties makes it easier to live a “pump and dump” lifestyle but, integrated computer databases mean that travelling from country to country is now difficult for sociopaths, and the tight labour market makes it tougher for sociopaths to find reasonably high paying work. I’d imagine the number of successful middle class sociopaths is relatively low compared with 40 years ago, but the number of sociopaths among the working class is probably increasing. A working class sociopath could probably do quite well out of more informals types of work such as drug dealing, construction work or working in the sex industry.

It makes sense. Sociopathy is low empathy. The hysteria-spectrum disorders, many of which are today known as conversion disorders, are also characterized by a desire to have other people drop everything they are doing to focus on the “victim”.
Perhaps that explains why the left is composed of sociopaths like JFK and Clinton on the one hand, and hysterical tumblerinas and BLM activists on the other?

Everyone assumes Clinton lied when he said he didn't inhale, but Craig points out that not only was that the truth, it's exactly the kind of manipulative behavior one can predict in genuine sociopaths.

A comparison with his fellow Bill and fellow sexual predator, Mr Cosby, might be instructive. Cosby is a one-trick pony; same method, same victim profile every time. Clinton is the polar opposite: all different kinds of women, a different trick every time. Kind of like me at the buffet; I have to sample a little of everything, to the point of saturation.

If it were a sickness, it were not heritable. Sicknesses aren’t. And we ought to try and find out what external factors actually make those people sick.
What you seem to describe is lack of empathy. But empathy is not inborn, it is learned. You only can argue that people learn it more or less easily. But that is hardly new, is it?

I’ve a definite antipathy against people who “pathologize” their opponents. I always hope to find a conservative voice who doesn’t do that – but a good man is hard to find.

If hysteria in women is a successful reproductive strategy, and if it’s the inheritance of this suite of genes that expresses itself as sociopathy in male offspring, this raises one very ominous point.

It would mean that as far as Nature is concerned, male sociopaths are simply a side effect. The hysteria in women is the only thing that really matters, if it produces more children than average and gets them raised in tough environments. This means the behavior of male sociopaths doesn’t inhibit reproduction enough for these genes to have been weeded out, even with guys like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et cetera throughout all human history busy doing their worst.

Oh never mind, I see the Inuit were specifically mentioned in the post.

There are plenty of sociopaths among indigenous Americans. The flip side of the social mechanisms for dealing with sociopaths within small groups of hunter-gatherers might be a heightened degree of amoral familialism within such groups. Much of modern tribal politics is infused with amoral familialism writ large. If the consequences of sociopathy can be mitigated or externalized by the tribe – for example by putting their sociopaths in a warrior caste – it might be a trait that can be used. We need no reminder that some hunter-gatherer tribe were very warlike.

Aggression against in-group members and outsiders seem to be very different phenomena. Traditional Comanche culture was very heavily dependent on raiding. They stole cattle and horses from the Spanish and Coahuiltecan and used the cattle both for food and to trade with Anglo traders for metal implements, leather goods, guns, etc. on which their culture was heavily based. But within their own tribe the Comanches don't seem to have had much violent conflict.

The Comanches might have been able to survive hunting buffalo without raiding but their life would then have been much more difficult. Many of the Southern Athabascans however could probably not have even physically survived without raiding as the territories in which some of them lived had too little game on which to subsist and they were dependent on rustling cattle just to have enough to eat. But again this raiding behavior was very different from behavior between individuals within the Southern Athabascan tribes.

I will make it required reading for anyone who wants to discuss with me elections/politics, the Constitution, immigration policy, or economic policy.

In the coastal PNW, Bundy’s MO was often to approach women of college age, feigning an injury (arm in sling, e.g.) and asking for help with something (appeal to empathy). All his known victims were white women aged 15 to 26, and most were students (in the PNW at least, that is very likely Northern European ancestry).

I cannot recall the context in which he once told an interviewer that he seemed to lack any capacity whatever for guilt. I also seem to recall him expressing in another interview surprise that anyone noticed that the various women had gone missing. That strangers would, say, notice him lurking around seemed unthinkable to him. He could not seem to comprehend the Northern European society of the states where he did most of his work (PNW–WA, OR, ID–and UT and CO).

FWIW he passed along his genes to a civil servant in Olympia, with whom he worked while abducting and killing these women. He impregnated her while in prison. Their daughter is now in her 30s.

Meanwhile, Hillary and the Seattle/Olympia/Portland liberals are telling my daughters and wife that they shouldn’t carry (firearms) when out alone or in the high country or forest.

Apart from sociopathy as an adaption where an individual exploits the vulnerabilities of others in his own group, could there also be entire groups who have evolved sociopathic strategies to exploit the vulnerabilities of a larger group whose society they live within as a minority?

It might be too simplistic to say that the surplus generated by agricultural societies enabled sociopathy. Wet rice farming required a high degree of organization at the village level. If someone’s personality impaired their ability to contribute to the team effort, it was a real problem. The societies derived from wet rice farming traditions are among those with the most highly developed community-centered ethics to this day.

Western individualism untempered by community-centered ethics allows sociopaths to thrive, as can be seen by the manifest sociopathic behavior at the highest levels of western business and financial establishments. If a sociopath can help their investors’ bottom line it doesn’t matter what other damage they may cause.

Second, the Western concept of psychopathy is based on one type of individual with a paticular configuration of traits. When you examine that one type, and assume that type exists in isolation, then it sure does seem like an odd feature that needs explanation.

But in reality, as you pointed out in your earlier post, psychopathic traits exist on a continuum. That is, the Dark Triad (Tetrad). Psychopathy is continuously distributed in the population just like other personality traits. Its selection is hence similar in nature to selection for all the other dimensions of personality.

As well, as I argue in my post above, psychopathic traits vary across populations. Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin. The "loner" psychopath (as opposed to one bound to kin) as described in this peice is probably more a Western phenomenon.

I have to disagree with Harpending and Sobus on one thing: this type of psychopathy would never have been adaptive in women. There is simply no female equivalent to male "cheater" strategies that would have been effective in the long run because of the high investment women need to make in their offspring. This too is a consequence of looking at things through a NW European lens.

In reality, the existence of psychopathic traits in women (beyond the normal distrubution of personality or more clannish traits) is probably a result of sexual antagonistic selection, if anything. Indeed, many masculine features in women are the result of such, I suspect:

Sociopathy doesn't look like a mental illness, being much less incapacitating than schizophrenia and most mental disorders. A sociopath can deal with other people well enough, perhaps too well.

In any case, I will discuss this in a future post on features and bugs in human psychology. Psychopathy is clearly an evolved trait, the result of selection – a feature – working as it should. By contrast, autism, schizophrenia, and the like are bugs; they are the result of something that is "broken" and are always being selected against.

Obligate male sexuality is also very much a bug: it is a mental illness that's always detrimental to fitness. Yet the DSM regards psychopathy as a disorder and homosexuality as not a disorder – brilliant... :\

In a small band of hunter-gatherers, a sociopath will not last long because he is always interacting with the same small group of people

I wonder about that. Are historically foraging indigenous American populations devoid of psychopathic traits – like say the Inuit?

As a layman with no specialist knowledge, I found this article extremely interesting and explanatory. It would help to explain, for instance, how the USA – most of whose people are socially admirable, moral, and friendly – seems to have acquired a leadership class composed almost exclusively of sociopaths. As well as being a very large nation, the USA is perhaps the first example of a “synthetic” nation with virtually no traditional native population. As well as the “melting pot” ideal, there are the cultural ideals such as the Protestant work ethic and the worship of money and success – all tailor-made for the mass production of sociopaths.

Another interesting point is the thought that primitive groups, who cooperate closely within the group and who efficiently identify and expel or destroy sociopaths, make up for this by behaving “sociopathically” as a group towards out-groups and individuals. I remember Jared Diamond writing that, less than a century ago, anyone travelling more than a few miles away from his home village in New Guinea would almost certainly be killed by the inhabitants of the next village. To them, any outsider was more likely than not to be dangerous, so the safest thing was to kill him right away.

So is the real question how big and how coherent our in-group is? Modern civilization attempts to dissolve traditional small-group loyalties and make us all good citizens of the state. But is the cost that we start to regard everyone else as out-group members?

But is the cost that we start to regard everyone else as out-group members?

The people in control are dropping all outgroup identifiers (except one) such as culture, race, religion, ethnicity or nationality. The current outgroup identifier is those who disagree with dropping all outgroup identifiers and that outgroup will be burned at the stake.

seems to have acquired a leadership class composed almost exclusively of sociopaths

This is the result of extreme economic and social stratification. In times past the peasants and proles would revolt, not going to happen this time.

Very cogent and thought provoking comment.
That the U.S.A. provides an ideal environment for Sociopaths to rise to wealth, power, and disproportionate influence would go a long way to explain the otherwise baffling situation of a basically decent moral people being led by utterly amoral self seekers.

Mental illness by any name effects humanity at local or international level. However, it all depends who is exposing or defending it. For example, many Christian, Muslim and Hindu religious pundits believe that LGBT is a mental disease and should be cured instead of used as a political tool.

On August 11, 2013, Jewish Daily Forward reported that several non-Jewish (Goyim) young kids in United States and Europe have died as result of Tay-Sachs degenerative disease, commonly known as the “Jewish disease”.

“Tay-Sachs is probably the best known “Jewish” disease. As many as one in 25 Ashkenazi Jews is a carrier of the defective recessive gene. Today, the majority of babies born with the disease are not Jewish. Of the approximately 15 new infantile Tay-Sachs cases diagnosed in United States each year “maybe one is from a Jewish family”. The disease leads to paralysis, blindness, seizures and eventually total incapacitation and death,” said the report.

A study conducted by Dr. Arnold A. Hutchnecker (died 2001), a New York psychiatrist, for the American Psychiatric Association, entitled, Mental Illness: The Jewish Disease, published on October 25, 1972 – concluded “although all Jews are not mentally ill, but mental illness is highly contagious and Jews are the principal sources of infection”.

It makes sense. Sociopathy is low empathy. The hysteria-spectrum disorders, many of which are today known as conversion disorders, are also characterized by a desire to have other people drop everything they are doing to focus on the "victim".
Perhaps that explains why the left is composed of sociopaths like JFK and Clinton on the one hand, and hysterical tumblerinas and BLM activists on the other?

Speaking of Bill, check out John Craig’s arguments for Clinton’s sociopathy:

Everyone assumes Clinton lied when he said he didn’t inhale, but Craig points out that not only was that the truth, it’s exactly the kind of manipulative behavior one can predict in genuine sociopaths.

A comparison with his fellow Bill and fellow sexual predator, Mr Cosby, might be instructive. Cosby is a one-trick pony; same method, same victim profile every time. Clinton is the polar opposite: all different kinds of women, a different trick every time. Kind of like me at the buffet; I have to sample a little of everything, to the point of saturation.

Can you speak to this study (http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/716875) which claims that strong performance in school is modestly correlated to bipolar disorder later in life? It would seem to suggest bipolar disorder may be adaptive some way. I once read that bipolar is more common in populations adapted to long winters, but I’m pretty sure that’s BS given the data at the World Health Organization, which shows similar prevalence levels across the world. Also, what do you think of the current way bipolar is diagnosed along a spectrum, which includes both type 1 and 2 versions of the disorder? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_spectrum_diagnostic_scale)

Also, schizophrenia presents itself in many milder forms, including schizotypal, schizoid, schizophreniform, etc. I’m not sure if these milder forms of the disease are adaptive at all, but sometimes those with these mild versions are highly successful (particularly in artistic fields).

Ted Bundy is possessed by demons. This is easy to tell from the photo. So are many others like him, even those in a lesser way. There is more to him then possession but this is one way of looking at him and his ilk.

If hysteria in women is a successful reproductive strategy, and if it's the inheritance of this suite of genes that expresses itself as sociopathy in male offspring, this raises one very ominous point.

It would mean that as far as Nature is concerned, male sociopaths are simply a side effect. The hysteria in women is the only thing that really matters, if it produces more children than average and gets them raised in tough environments. This means the behavior of male sociopaths doesn't inhibit reproduction enough for these genes to have been weeded out, even with guys like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et cetera throughout all human history busy doing their worst.

Correct. But you seem surprised. The female is ALWAYS primary. Read Chateau Heartiste and his The Fundamental Premise.

As a layman with no specialist knowledge, I found this article extremely interesting and explanatory. It would help to explain, for instance, how the USA - most of whose people are socially admirable, moral, and friendly - seems to have acquired a leadership class composed almost exclusively of sociopaths. As well as being a very large nation, the USA is perhaps the first example of a "synthetic" nation with virtually no traditional native population. As well as the "melting pot" ideal, there are the cultural ideals such as the Protestant work ethic and the worship of money and success - all tailor-made for the mass production of sociopaths.

Another interesting point is the thought that primitive groups, who cooperate closely within the group and who efficiently identify and expel or destroy sociopaths, make up for this by behaving "sociopathically" as a group towards out-groups and individuals. I remember Jared Diamond writing that, less than a century ago, anyone travelling more than a few miles away from his home village in New Guinea would almost certainly be killed by the inhabitants of the next village. To them, any outsider was more likely than not to be dangerous, so the safest thing was to kill him right away.

So is the real question how big and how coherent our in-group is? Modern civilization attempts to dissolve traditional small-group loyalties and make us all good citizens of the state. But is the cost that we start to regard everyone else as out-group members?

But is the cost that we start to regard everyone else as out-group members?

The people in control are dropping all outgroup identifiers (except one) such as culture, race, religion, ethnicity or nationality. The current outgroup identifier is those who disagree with dropping all outgroup identifiers and that outgroup will be burned at the stake.

seems to have acquired a leadership class composed almost exclusively of sociopaths

This is the result of extreme economic and social stratification. In times past the peasants and proles would revolt, not going to happen this time.

My suggestion was that all human beings naturally treat some people in a way we describe as “sociopathic”. Everywhere and always – except for special groups such as the religiously enlightened or highly empathic – some out-groups and their members are systematically treated as almost subhuman. That is, their humanity is ignored as being irrelevant. Even hunter-gatherers, nomads and primitive farmers living in small villages regard all outsiders as enemies.

Today we mostly live in huge nation-states, and the inhabitants of each nation-state tend to treat the inhabitants of other nation-states as different, inferior, suspect and potential enemies. Americans, for instance, see almost all foreigners as inferior, and some – such as Russians, Chinese, and Arabs – as enemies by definition (regardless of their actual behaviour).

But, even within a single nation-state, those of sociopathic disposition treat their fellow-citizens like out-group members – but secretly, without appearing to do so. Game theory showed long ago that, when 19 out of 20 or so of a group behave altruistically and in a trusting way, there are distinct benefits for all group members. But, at about this level, a niche opens up for the remaining one out of 20 to behave cynically and exploitatively, pretending to be altruistic and trustworthy while in fact cheating and lying. This is the criminal class, plus the “secret” criminal class that runs business and government.

Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia aren't termed personality disoders, which are persistent from childhood. Personality disorders are a subset of psychiatric disorders, and they're scored on a separate axis from that of the principal diagnosis, such as schizophrenia.

Personality disorders are a subset of psychiatric disorders, and they’re scored on a separate axis from

If something exists on a continuum that spans the population then it’s not a “disorder” at all, just an extreme of normal variation. Now more than familial “retardation” (i.e., low IQ) is a disorder.

You're playing a semantic game where you have no competence. Familial mental retardation is termed a "developmental disorder." You've got to let the professionals define the terms of their discipline - unless you actually know something.

The widespread acceptance of the medical model of the soul has turned out to be a dark chapter in the history of western decline. We’ve all but lost the concept of evil and, in turn, have rendered society incapable of confronting evil.

We blame guns instead of shooters, glands instead of gluttony, genes instead of drunkards; we think slums make thugs and not the other way around, and offer up the “born this way” excuses for everything from sodomy to pedophilia. We cannot look Islamic evil in the eye and call it that even when wretched fanatics are beheading people and shouting their damnable “Allahu akhbars”.

Perhaps most telling of all the sins of the west, we look upon people aborting babies, cutting them up for their parts, and exchanging those parts for money, and we cannot bring ourselves to call it what it is — murder and essentially cannibalism. The people who are doing this are not “sick,” as if they have contracted an illness. They are just evil.

Are you suggesting that evil is an objective category or concept and one with a meaning and set of possible applications that anyone can be taught?

Is it not a mere word applied to the aspect or aspects of which one is aware (or thinks one can guess at reliably) of some chain of events? And do you suggest that there is some objective way of determining the necessary connection between the (necessarily partial and selectively) apprehended facts and the application of the "evil" label?

Take your characterisation of abortion as "murder" as your test case. Do you not recognise that this is a result of cultural determination that many have escaped from without any help from medicalisation? Whether it is given to you by Catholic or evangelical Protestant, Orthodox Jewish or Muslim faith it is after all, is it not, a belief given to you without benefit of scientific or analytical reasoning. Otherwise why would you appropriate a term with a clear enough legal meaning, namely "murder", and use it inaccurately for mere rhetoric.

OK some people's religion makes them get as upset by an abortion as by executing an innocent man or woman (more upset it often seems). Why should that count in aid of attempts at rational argument when all it tells me of any substance is that maybe you should be put on the FBI's terrorist watch list - family planning clinic division?

Sins of the west? Infanticide of actual already born babies was/is normal practice over vast regions of the East to this day. Mohammed forbade it among his Arab converts, whose people used to bury daughters alive in the sand. Among certain Indian castes, no girls at all were raised , and wives were sought from among castes who were less thorough in that way. This is not an exaggeration, or reference to an arcane practice. I just read an article a few years ago in an Indian publication, describing this and interviewing people who had done it.

Historically, Jews (from what I've read), and surprisingly even Muslims, gave the decision to the pregnant woman, for as long as the fetus is dependent on her, she is the deciding factor. But I am not a theological expert on those religions. Hindus forbade it, believing it was like striking the husband. But considering how fast and loose they were about female infanticide, I don't take their ban on abortion seriously. Christian "doctors of the church" thought little of terminating a pregnancy as long as "quickening" had not yet occurred. That can be subjective. Strong opinion against it became writ in law during the 19th century (where 20% of all pregnancies were deliberately terminated) probably because it became easier with the invention of anesthesia.

So abortion is not some singular sin of the "west", whatever one's opinion of it. Certainly not of the "west."

As a layman with no specialist knowledge, I found this article extremely interesting and explanatory. It would help to explain, for instance, how the USA - most of whose people are socially admirable, moral, and friendly - seems to have acquired a leadership class composed almost exclusively of sociopaths. As well as being a very large nation, the USA is perhaps the first example of a "synthetic" nation with virtually no traditional native population. As well as the "melting pot" ideal, there are the cultural ideals such as the Protestant work ethic and the worship of money and success - all tailor-made for the mass production of sociopaths.

Another interesting point is the thought that primitive groups, who cooperate closely within the group and who efficiently identify and expel or destroy sociopaths, make up for this by behaving "sociopathically" as a group towards out-groups and individuals. I remember Jared Diamond writing that, less than a century ago, anyone travelling more than a few miles away from his home village in New Guinea would almost certainly be killed by the inhabitants of the next village. To them, any outsider was more likely than not to be dangerous, so the safest thing was to kill him right away.

So is the real question how big and how coherent our in-group is? Modern civilization attempts to dissolve traditional small-group loyalties and make us all good citizens of the state. But is the cost that we start to regard everyone else as out-group members?

Very cogent and thought provoking comment.
That the U.S.A. provides an ideal environment for Sociopaths to rise to wealth, power, and disproportionate influence would go a long way to explain the otherwise baffling situation of a basically decent moral people being led by utterly amoral self seekers.

Everyone assumes Clinton lied when he said he didn't inhale, but Craig points out that not only was that the truth, it's exactly the kind of manipulative behavior one can predict in genuine sociopaths.

A comparison with his fellow Bill and fellow sexual predator, Mr Cosby, might be instructive. Cosby is a one-trick pony; same method, same victim profile every time. Clinton is the polar opposite: all different kinds of women, a different trick every time. Kind of like me at the buffet; I have to sample a little of everything, to the point of saturation.

I think this piece of evidence leaves no doubt about Bill’s sociopathy:

It has never been easier to quickly move through social circles and from city to city.

Modern ethics condemns many mechanisms which punish sociopathic behaviour such as gossip, shunning, feuding between families and extralegal revenge.

The website Chateau Heartistes provides advice that suggests that sociopathy may be a plus in the modern dating game.

Social services provide for the offspring of abandoned children in a way that they did not for most of human history.

Oh it is very clear that a century or so ago if a man did not make some effort to support his family then his children would be subject to very high mortality. Nowadays some males in the inner cities have innumerable children that they do nothing for and of whom they may not know they exist. But thanks to the modern welfare state their children’s chances of survival to reproductive age are little different from those of the children of “helicopter” parents.

The welfare state probably hasn’t existed long enough yet to have had much genetic effect. But if the welfare state can be sustained then obviously over time it will select for a relatively low degree of parental investment, particularly on the part of men.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giacomo_Casanova Prince Charles de Ligne, who understood Casanova well, and who knew most of the prominent individuals of the age, thought Casanova the most interesting man he had ever met: "there is nothing in the world of which he is not capable." Rounding out the portrait, the Prince also stated:
The only things about which he knows nothing are those which he believes himself to be expert: the rules of the dance, the French language, good taste, the way of the world, savoir vivre. It is only his comedies which are not funny, only his philosophical works which lack philosophy—all the rest are filled with it; there is always something weighty, new, piquant, profound. He is a well of knowledge, but he quotes Homer and Horace ad nauseam. His wit and his sallies are like Attic salt. He is sensitive and generous, but displease him in the slightest and he is unpleasant, vindictive, and detestable. He believes in nothing except what is most incredible, being superstitious about everything. He loves and lusts after everything. ... He is proud because he is nothing. ... Never tell him you have heard the story he is going to tell you. ... Never omit to greet him in passing, for the merest trifle will make him your enemy.[111]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexy_son_hypothesis The sexy son hypothesis in evolutionary biology and sexual selection — proposed by Ronald Fisher in 1930 — states that a female's ideal mate choice among potential mates is one whose genes will produce male offspring with the best chance of reproductive success and implies that a potential mate's capacity as a parental caregiver or any other direct benefits the father can offer the mother such as nuptial gifts, or good territory are irrelevant to his value as the potential father of the female's offspring. Fisher's principle means that the sex ratio (except in certain eusocial insects) is always 1:1 between males and females, yet what matters most are her "sexy sons"' future breeding successes, more likely if they have a promiscuous father, in creating large numbers of offspring carrying copies of her genes

This sounds like a rationale for seeing dastardly behaviour as a feature not a bug; girls prefer boys who will use and dump, because sons fathered by such young men will be sexual tyrannosauruses spreading the mother's genes.

Yes, but on the other hand in a primitive society dependent mostly on hunting the survival of a women and her children is totally dependent on the willingness and ability of her mate to provide food. An Eskimo women who choose a mate for her children who was either unwilling or unable to provide her with food was doomed as soon as winter arrived.

I suppose men would rather have sex with their woman than eat her share of the food (and have to do the cooking). A really lazy and bad Inuit hunter would soon starve, so surviving men were probably all reasonably good at bringing home the bacon.

I have heard a few times over the years of heiresses (who could ignore practical considerations of suitors' earning power) that married sociopaths. Young girls and women free of material considerations seem inherently attracted to the glib casanova type.

Traditional Inuit society was almost totally communalistic (at least the Canadian Inuit). Not only was all food shared in common (by necessity,) the women practically were, too. A man who wouldn't share food with others in his tribe (wife and children included) is unthinkable--a total violation of tribal norms. A man who couldn't hunt would be supported by the tribe, die of hunger, or commit suicide. At any rate, his wife would be unlikely to suffer too much, as she would be sleeping with several other men, who of course would bring home plenty of good seal to share with the entire tribe.

There are plenty of sociopaths among indigenous Americans. The flip side of the social mechanisms for dealing with sociopaths within small groups of hunter-gatherers might be a heightened degree of amoral familialism within such groups. Much of modern tribal politics is infused with amoral familialism writ large. If the consequences of sociopathy can be mitigated or externalized by the tribe - for example by putting their sociopaths in a warrior caste - it might be a trait that can be used. We need no reminder that some hunter-gatherer tribe were very warlike.

Aggression against in-group members and outsiders seem to be very different phenomena. Traditional Comanche culture was very heavily dependent on raiding. They stole cattle and horses from the Spanish and Coahuiltecan and used the cattle both for food and to trade with Anglo traders for metal implements, leather goods, guns, etc. on which their culture was heavily based. But within their own tribe the Comanches don’t seem to have had much violent conflict.

The Comanches might have been able to survive hunting buffalo without raiding but their life would then have been much more difficult. Many of the Southern Athabascans however could probably not have even physically survived without raiding as the territories in which some of them lived had too little game on which to subsist and they were dependent on rustling cattle just to have enough to eat. But again this raiding behavior was very different from behavior between individuals within the Southern Athabascan tribes.

In other words philosophical Christianity. The philosophical idealism of Christianity gives each individual the tools to freely organize themselves into productive groups irrespective of clan. Genetics is old tech. Today philosophies drive genetics.

Philosophies are 100% intellectual in nature. Philosophies are NOT genetic. Philosophies do select genetics – they do select who progresses and has offspring.

Only when Christian philosophy is recognized for the benevolent progress that it generates, can mankind progress. There is NO other choice.

"Philosophies" may be 100 per cent "intellectual" in nature in contrast to being generated genetically. But does that not avoid all the serious points of potential dispute. Do you not recognise that most people's philosophies, even when internally consistent which is surely rare, are a product of upbringing and early indoctrination rather than intellectual processing and evaluation? Do you not also accept that most people's "philosophical" views and disposition and willingness to change or adapt is heavily influenced by emotion and personality? And that they in turn are heavily influenced by expression of inherited genes?

Personality disorders are a subset of psychiatric disorders, and they’re scored on a separate axis from

If something exists on a continuum that spans the population then it's not a "disorder" at all, just an extreme of normal variation. Now more than familial "retardation" (i.e., low IQ) is a disorder.

You’re playing a semantic game where you have no competence. Familial mental retardation is termed a “developmental disorder.” You’ve got to let the professionals define the terms of their discipline – unless you actually know something.

Yes, but on the other hand in a primitive society dependent mostly on hunting the survival of a women and her children is totally dependent on the willingness and ability of her mate to provide food. An Eskimo women who choose a mate for her children who was either unwilling or unable to provide her with food was doomed as soon as winter arrived.

I suppose men would rather have sex with their woman than eat her share of the food (and have to do the cooking). A really lazy and bad Inuit hunter would soon starve, so surviving men were probably all reasonably good at bringing home the bacon.

I have heard a few times over the years of heiresses (who could ignore practical considerations of suitors’ earning power) that married sociopaths. Young girls and women free of material considerations seem inherently attracted to the glib casanova type.

In terms of reproductive success, the golden age for sociopaths was the period stretching from the 1920s to the late 1960s. On the one hand, parent-supervised courtship (“calling”) had given way to dating, thus making young women more accessible. Seduction itself became more positively viewed in popular culture (previously, it had been considered reprehensible and even a reason for incarceration). On the other hand, adoption of unwanted babies became much more common (before the 1920s, adoption by non-relatives was very rare in North America). So “cads” made plenty of babies and found plenty of takers for them.

Since the late 1960s, “cads” have been making fewer and fewer babies. Good girls are still having sex with bad boys but are now having fewer babies with them.

Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin.

That’s how we see it, but that’s not how they see it. Universal morality is not the rulebook that guides most people on this planet.

There is simply no female equivalent to male “cheater” strategies that would have been effective in the long run because of the high investment women need to make in their offspring.

In some societies, notably “tropical horticulturalists,” women enjoy a high degree of reproductive autonomy. A mother can provide for her needs, and for those of her children, with relatively little male assistance. In fact, assistance comes just as much from her parents and their kin. So she will try to sponge off a large number of people, and if some of them become too hostile she can move on to another person. And if they all become hostile, the consequences aren’t too catastrophic. She can still get by on her own.

This is a different situation from one where the mother is primarily dependent on one person, i.e., her husband. If she loses his support, she and her children may die. The consequences can be that catastrophic. So hysteria would be counterproductive. Either her husband might leave or his ability to support her might be harmed. It’s like an employer who doesn’t want to work his valued employees too hard because they cannot be easily replaced.

Are historically foraging indigenous American populations devoid of psychopathic traits – like say the Inuit?

Sociopathy (or psychopathy — the words are almost synonymous) exists in all human populations because any strategy to eliminate it will never be 100% effective. My impression is that mental illness among the Inuit tends to be self-destructive. Suicide used to be very rare but now is very common.

could there also be entire groups who have evolved sociopathic strategies to exploit the vulnerabilities of a larger group whose society they live within as a minority?

You really want me to talk about Jews, don’t you? Most human cultures show favoritism toward in-group members, and it’s not just the Jews. Look at the American Supreme Court. A hundred years ago, all of the justices were White Protestants. Now, none of them are. This has not come about because White Protestants, as a group, have become progressively more and more stupid and thus unable to become judges. It’s because they see themselves as rugged individualists and will not act collectively to defend their interests.

Rugged individualism works marvellously when everyone practices it. Unfortunately, most people in this imperfect world play by a different rule book. And it’s not just the Jews. It’s most folks. The Irish were very good at collective self-defence and self-boosting in their day.

You (stupidly) fail even to understand what Frost contends.

Please, I appreciate the compliment, but insults tend to make discussion difficult.

Very low IQ is an adaptation rather than a disase, but we recognize it as disabling.

It depends on the environment you have to function in. On a worldwide basis, I suspect that IQ correlates negatively with reproductive success.

If hysteria in women is a successful reproductive strategy, and if it’s the inheritance of this suite of genes that expresses itself as sociopathy in male offspring, this raises one very ominous point. It would mean that as far as Nature is concerned, male sociopaths are simply a side effect.

I don’t follow your argument. Those male offspring will have children too, and their ability to sire a lot of children could be helped along by a psychopathic personality. Again, it depends on the culture the psychopath is living in.

It might be too simplistic to say that the surplus generated by agricultural societies enabled sociopathy. Wet rice farming required a high degree of organization at the village level.

I wouldn’t say “enabled.” I would say “created a greater potential for.” What you say about wet rice farming is correct. In that case, there was strong selection for a collectivistic mindset:

So is the real question how big and how coherent our in-group is? Modern civilization attempts to dissolve traditional small-group loyalties and make us all good citizens of the state. But is the cost that we start to regard everyone else as out-group members?

This is what’s happening with many white Americans. They have long had a weak sense of kinship while organizing themselves collectively at a broader community level. Unfortunately, those collective institutions have been either taken over by the government or forced to comply with principles of “fairness.” As a result, they no longer have any way to defend themselves collectively.

This is not the case with other groups. They’re used to organizing collectively at the level of the family or kin group. They feel no guilt or shame over favoritism because for them it’s perfectly normal.

“Tay-Sachs is probably the best known “Jewish” disease. As many as one in 25 Ashkenazi Jews is a carrier of the defective recessive gene. Today, the majority of babies born with the disease are not Jewish.

Tay-Sachs does exist in other human populations, including French Canadians curious enough. Among Ashkenazi Jews and French Canadians, it’s one of several unusually common disorders that cluster within the same metabolic pathway: lysosomal storage for brain tissues. It looks like the result of strong selection for intelligence over a relatively short time frame. In that kind of fast-track situation, selection will even favor alleles that are harmful when one inherits two copies of the same allele.

We’ve all but lost the concept of evil and, in turn, have rendered society incapable of confronting evil.

The concept of “evil” is still with us. It has simply been redefined. “Racists” are defined as evil and are given the treatment that was once reserved for rapists. In terms of social acceptance, it’s probably better to be a rapist than a racist.

The philosophical idealism of Christianity gives each individual the tools to freely organize themselves into productive groups irrespective of clan. Genetics is old tech. Today philosophies drive genetics.

There are different branches of Christianity. Protestantism has gone the farthest down the road of individualism and renunciation of kinship ties.

As for genetics being “old tech,” I wouldn’t be so sure. For the moment, genes are still in the driver’s seat.

"There is simply no female equivalent to male “cheater” strategies that would have been effective in the long run because of the high investment women need to make in their offspring."

Except for pawning the kid off on someone else to raise.

One would think that psychopathic behavior arose mainly in the Alphas. They're the ones who threatened or beat the crap out of challengers, who ate while others starved, who killed lower males offspring if they were "inconvenient", who randomly bullied lower males, and who cajoled tribal members into surprise attacks on nearby tribes.

I've follow your articles with keen anticipation (they map to what I have believed assumed/believed for decades as an amateur socio-biologist who accounts differences in races and cultures to evolutionary adaptation to the three BioZones).

Questions: That said, do you believe that Calvinism in its evolution from low-kinship and an internalization of moral and religious rules has fostered individualism in extremis to the point that it can no longer be the ground for holding a society together? In other words, demarcate radical individualism and its modern corrolate that all "rules" are now personal choices -- a radical relativism -- and one has moral and social anarchy instead of an homogenous culture based on the internalization of a specific set of moral precepts. Has Calvanistic individualism evoled into a "universalization" that now potentially includes all rules and behaviors such that if there is still a sense of guilt associated with beliefs and behaviors, it is the sense of guilt that follows from NOT accepting that universalization?

The philosophical idealism of Christianity gives each individual the tools to freely organize themselves into productive groups irrespective of clan.

There are different branches of Christianity. Protestantism has gone the farthest down the road of individualism and renunciation of kinship ties.

There are many Christian sects – but only one basic New Testament Christian philosophy – the philosophy is intellectual and idealist in nature –it says think about your worldly actions - it says do things that are hopeful and life affirming - it says go for the good – it leads to freedom. Here is that philosophy, put into world changing words.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Our forefathers were not all religious Christians – but they all were philosophical Christians.

We must not throw out the philosophical Christian baby, with the religious Christian bath water.

p.s. It is hard to put into a sentence or two – but the problem with Protestants is twofold - they have replaced the philosophical Jesus Christ with the literal bible - and they have abandoned their Christian good works to government (they have replaced voluntary good works with force)...

Please, I appreciate the compliment, but insults tend to make discussion difficult.

I'm not into turning the other cheek. When Jayman uses the term "idiot" for opponents, I feel free to call his comments (not him) stupid. Just because the supposed "idiot" isn't in the discussion is beside the point of the rudeness involved.

Very low IQ is an adaptation rather than a disase, but we recognize it as disabling.

It depends on the environment you have to function in. On a worldwide basis, I suspect that IQ correlates negatively with reproductive success.

Perhaps my conceptualization is wrong, but I would think familial low IQ is an adaptation even if it limits reproductive success. I take the criterion to be whether it is produced by selection, not whether it facilitates reproduction. I'm open to correction. (It is produced by selection even if it is in itself negative - if that even has meaning. For example, low intelligence affords a smaller brain with fewer metabolic demands.)

Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin.

That’s how we see it, but that’s not how they see it. Universal morality is not the rulebook that guides most people on this planet.

I completely agree. But I think the similarity is telling. What we call "psychopathy" is just perhaps individuals (at least Western society) than has a much higher than average of these exploitative traits – traits which are common in clannish societies. They are one and the same, I am saying.

There is simply no female equivalent to male “cheater” strategies that would have been effective in the long run because of the high investment women need to make in their offspring.

In some societies, notably “tropical horticulturalists,” women enjoy a high degree of reproductive autonomy. A mother can provide for her needs, and for those of her children, with relatively little male assistance. In fact, assistance comes just as much from her parents and their kin. So she will try to sponge off a large number of people, and if some of them become too hostile she can move on to another person. And if they all become hostile, the consequences aren’t too catastrophic. She can still get by on her own.

I can see that. Female cheater strategies would be a complete bust almost anywhere else.

I suppose men would rather have sex with their woman than eat her share of the food (and have to do the cooking). A really lazy and bad Inuit hunter would soon starve, so surviving men were probably all reasonably good at bringing home the bacon.

I have heard a few times over the years of heiresses (who could ignore practical considerations of suitors' earning power) that married sociopaths. Young girls and women free of material considerations seem inherently attracted to the glib casanova type.

And such a male in traditional Eskimo society would probably have a very hard time getting a wife.

You're playing a semantic game where you have no competence. Familial mental retardation is termed a "developmental disorder." You've got to let the professionals define the terms of their discipline - unless you actually know something.

You’re playing a semantic game where you have no competence. Familial mental retardation is termed a “developmental disorder.”

By idiots.

You have me mistaken for someone who cares about what you think, since you beautifully demonstrate here just how much the “professionals” actually know.

since you beautifully demonstrate here just how much the “professionals” actually know.

No, that is just plain stupid. You demonstrate that you don't understand how technical terms are used in science. You are a fundamentalist of sorts, who thinks there's rock bottom "meaning." Have you had any education? Nobody is informed.

Take a cue from Razib Kahn's latest post:

"In Speciation, a book co-written by two evolutionary geneticists (that you should read!), the authors are frank that their idea about what a species is is purely instrumental. That is, what are their end goals, and what does the species concept get us?"

As with the "species" concept, so the disorder concept. Everyone seriously talking about this stuff besides you understands this.

Recall the course of this discussion. You said psychiatrists were confused about psychopathy because it is really dimensional. I pointed out that they in fact considered it dimensional. Then you said, well, if it's dimensional, then it's not a disorder. You're just guessing. (You're intellectually dishonest; you refuse to admit ignorance. You're also militantly stupid.)

Emblematic says,"...could there also be entire groups who have evolved sociopathic strategies to exploit the vulnerabilities of a larger group whose society they live within as a minority?"

The Jews are a tribe of psychopaths. No all maybe not even the majority but a large number. All of the Jews ancient writings are nothing more than a manual for psychopaths to live by. The Talmud is nothing but one psychopathic thought after another. The Talmud “great enlightenment” basically says that everyone not Jewish is there to serve Jews. All their property is really the Jews. No one is really human unless they're Jews and their lives don’t matter. A psychopathic religion for a psychopathic people.

They've been thrown out of every single country that they've been to in any numbers. Psychopaths having no empathy themselves can only go by the feedback they get from the people they are exploiting. So they push and push to see what they can get away with. The normal people build up resentment towards them. Thinking “surely they will reform or repent” like a normal person who does wrong. Of course the Jews do not. They don’t have the mental process for reform. Then in a huge mass outpouring of hate for the Jews, fed up with the refusal to reform their behavior, they attack and/or deport them. In this stage of the cycle the Big/Rich Jews escape and the little Jews are attacked.

Start over.

Henry Kissinger's quote, "Any people who have been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong".

Henry Kissinger’s quote, “Any people who have been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong”.

Can you provide the source for this quote?

Don’t insist too much on this topic. Mr. Frost doesn’t have much patience with this kind of comments.

Critics grumbled about the three S’s: that he married a shiksa on Shabbes and served shrimp—a pained judgment on his second wedding to the tall, blonde, well-bred WASP Nancy Maginnes. Kissinger fueled perceptions of self-hatred by rudely ignoring old friends who called him “Heinz” or tried to “bagel” him—today’s shorthand for the Jewish tendency when out in public to connect, subtly or otherwise, with a fellow member of the tribe. But, as befits an intellectual swashbuckler who coined memorable phrases such as “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” Kissinger distanced himself from his Jewish roots with damning wisecracks. “If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be anti-Semitic,” he once quipped, and “any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.” Another time, he told a friend, “I was born Jewish, but the truth is that has no significance for me. … America has given me everything.”

"...Don’t insist too much on this topic. Mr. Frost doesn’t have much patience with this kind of comments..."

It is rude but the fact remains that the idea "The Jews are a tribe of psychopaths" has enormous explanatory power. Maybe it's wrong but using this one idea to explain certain aspects of the World you will never be surprised and many things that are completely baffling become simple and intuitive. The whole point of blogs such as these are ultimately to make sense of the World and navigate within the World.

The past has shown that psychopaths can destroy whole countries. It only takes a few psychopaths to destroy a country. A prime example, who is not a Jew, is Alcibiades. Alcibiades went from city to city in the ancient world. In Sparta he was more Spartan than the Spartans. Changing his chameleon skin every time he moved somewhere else and betraying everyone he came in contact with. Alcibiades killed Athens with risky schemes to glorify himself.

"...He had, as they say, one power which transcended all others, and proved an implement of his chase for men: that of assimilating and adapting himself to the pursuits and lives of others, thereby assuming more violent changes than the chameleon. That animal, however, as it is said, is utterly unable to assume one colour, namely, white; but Alcibiades could associate with good and bad alike, and found naught that he could not imitate and practice. 5 In Sparta, he was all for bodily training, simplicity of life, and severity of countenance; in Ionia, for p65 luxurious ease and pleasure; in Thrace, for drinking deep; in Thessaly, for riding hard; and when he was thrown with Tissaphernes the satrap, he outdid even Persian magnificence in his pomp and lavishness. It was not that he could so easily pass entirely from one manner of man to another, nor that he actually underwent in every case a change in his real character; but when he saw that his natural manners were likely to be annoying to his associates, he was quick to assume any counterfeit exterior which might in each case be suitable for them..."

Definite psychopath. Alcibiades was responsible for talking the Athenians into attacking Syracuse. Syracuse was directly responsible for the end of Athens as a power.

Psychopaths can do the most ridiculous things. There's an excellent book by Hervey Cleckley "The Mask of Sanity". Read this one small chapter about a Spath called Stanley.

The widespread acceptance of the medical model of the soul has turned out to be a dark chapter in the history of western decline. We've all but lost the concept of evil and, in turn, have rendered society incapable of confronting evil.

We blame guns instead of shooters, glands instead of gluttony, genes instead of drunkards; we think slums make thugs and not the other way around, and offer up the "born this way" excuses for everything from sodomy to pedophilia. We cannot look Islamic evil in the eye and call it that even when wretched fanatics are beheading people and shouting their damnable "Allahu akhbars".

Perhaps most telling of all the sins of the west, we look upon people aborting babies, cutting them up for their parts, and exchanging those parts for money, and we cannot bring ourselves to call it what it is -- murder and essentially cannibalism. The people who are doing this are not "sick," as if they have contracted an illness. They are just evil.

Are you suggesting that evil is an objective category or concept and one with a meaning and set of possible applications that anyone can be taught?

Is it not a mere word applied to the aspect or aspects of which one is aware (or thinks one can guess at reliably) of some chain of events? And do you suggest that there is some objective way of determining the necessary connection between the (necessarily partial and selectively) apprehended facts and the application of the “evil” label?

Take your characterisation of abortion as “murder” as your test case. Do you not recognise that this is a result of cultural determination that many have escaped from without any help from medicalisation? Whether it is given to you by Catholic or evangelical Protestant, Orthodox Jewish or Muslim faith it is after all, is it not, a belief given to you without benefit of scientific or analytical reasoning. Otherwise why would you appropriate a term with a clear enough legal meaning, namely “murder”, and use it inaccurately for mere rhetoric.

OK some people’s religion makes them get as upset by an abortion as by executing an innocent man or woman (more upset it often seems). Why should that count in aid of attempts at rational argument when all it tells me of any substance is that maybe you should be put on the FBI’s terrorist watch list – family planning clinic division?

Thanks, Wiz. If I understood your post, you appear to be making my point for me. Gee, those people over there did more of this so-called Bad Stuff than we did. So how could it be objectively wrong? By such a standard, everyone would be guilty... and we know that can't be true!

Such is the mindset in a civilization that rejects the idea that there are such things as moral facts.

And yet, if somebody broke into your home tonight and did violence to you and your family, you'd have no qualms about defining that as an evil act. But to use such a word necessarily infers a pre-existing standard.

In a lame attempt to hobble out of a mess of contradictions, people hit on the medical idea of the soul. It's just blame-shifting with a big vocabulary. It doesn't work, and the culture-wide moral evasion is creating a situation far worse than just admitting the ugly truth: Standards exist; they're objective and independent of our thinking, and we're pretty much all guilty of having violated them.

A precondition for solving any problem is admitting what the problem is. Where we go from there is a discussion for another day.

In other words philosophical Christianity. The philosophical idealism of Christianity gives each individual the tools to freely organize themselves into productive groups irrespective of clan. Genetics is old tech. Today philosophies drive genetics.

Philosophies are 100% intellectual in nature. Philosophies are NOT genetic. Philosophies do select genetics – they do select who progresses and has offspring.

Only when Christian philosophy is recognized for the benevolent progress that it generates, can mankind progress. There is NO other choice.

“Philosophies” may be 100 per cent “intellectual” in nature in contrast to being generated genetically. But does that not avoid all the serious points of potential dispute. Do you not recognise that most people’s philosophies, even when internally consistent which is surely rare, are a product of upbringing and early indoctrination rather than intellectual processing and evaluation? Do you not also accept that most people’s “philosophical” views and disposition and willingness to change or adapt is heavily influenced by emotion and personality? And that they in turn are heavily influenced by expression of inherited genes?

The widespread acceptance of the medical model of the soul has turned out to be a dark chapter in the history of western decline. We've all but lost the concept of evil and, in turn, have rendered society incapable of confronting evil.

We blame guns instead of shooters, glands instead of gluttony, genes instead of drunkards; we think slums make thugs and not the other way around, and offer up the "born this way" excuses for everything from sodomy to pedophilia. We cannot look Islamic evil in the eye and call it that even when wretched fanatics are beheading people and shouting their damnable "Allahu akhbars".

Perhaps most telling of all the sins of the west, we look upon people aborting babies, cutting them up for their parts, and exchanging those parts for money, and we cannot bring ourselves to call it what it is -- murder and essentially cannibalism. The people who are doing this are not "sick," as if they have contracted an illness. They are just evil.

Sins of the west? Infanticide of actual already born babies was/is normal practice over vast regions of the East to this day. Mohammed forbade it among his Arab converts, whose people used to bury daughters alive in the sand. Among certain Indian castes, no girls at all were raised , and wives were sought from among castes who were less thorough in that way. This is not an exaggeration, or reference to an arcane practice. I just read an article a few years ago in an Indian publication, describing this and interviewing people who had done it.

Historically, Jews (from what I’ve read), and surprisingly even Muslims, gave the decision to the pregnant woman, for as long as the fetus is dependent on her, she is the deciding factor. But I am not a theological expert on those religions. Hindus forbade it, believing it was like striking the husband. But considering how fast and loose they were about female infanticide, I don’t take their ban on abortion seriously. Christian “doctors of the church” thought little of terminating a pregnancy as long as “quickening” had not yet occurred. That can be subjective. Strong opinion against it became writ in law during the 19th century (where 20% of all pregnancies were deliberately terminated) probably because it became easier with the invention of anesthesia.

So abortion is not some singular sin of the “west”, whatever one’s opinion of it. Certainly not of the “west.”

You read my comment as if I had said, "sins found exclusively in the West."

I didn't. There are, or have been, civilizations with features more depraved than ours. That exonerates nobody.

Further, if the slip-slidin' West persists in defining evil as two standard deviations beneath some ever-declining global norm, we'll soon arrive in a condition where everyone is doing the worst thing he can think of just to keep up with the neighbors. So here's a captive... shall I burn him alive or behead him and post the fun on Youtube?

“Thus, the high-trust environment of the family cannot extend to society in general. Among other things, this is why the market economy has failed to develop spontaneously over most of the world and over most of history.”

Sure can. Kick the psychopaths out and keep them out. That alone will end government. There are 7.3 billion people – psychopaths are needed only as role models for aspiring psychopaths. Once only the civilized are left, use insurance for property loss and commercial transactions, use private fire and security protection, use arbitration for settling disputes, and create new businesses for new problems.

Government creates societies organized around all of its flaws and failures and then proclaims itself the solution to everything. If mankind weren’t halfway to being an ant colony, nobody would fall for that BS.

In terms of reproductive success, the golden age for sociopaths was the period stretching from the 1920s to the late 1960s. On the one hand, parent-supervised courtship ("calling") had given way to dating, thus making young women more accessible. Seduction itself became more positively viewed in popular culture (previously, it had been considered reprehensible and even a reason for incarceration). On the other hand, adoption of unwanted babies became much more common (before the 1920s, adoption by non-relatives was very rare in North America). So "cads" made plenty of babies and found plenty of takers for them.

Since the late 1960s, "cads" have been making fewer and fewer babies. Good girls are still having sex with bad boys but are now having fewer babies with them.

Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin.

That's how we see it, but that's not how they see it. Universal morality is not the rulebook that guides most people on this planet.

There is simply no female equivalent to male “cheater” strategies that would have been effective in the long run because of the high investment women need to make in their offspring.

In some societies, notably "tropical horticulturalists," women enjoy a high degree of reproductive autonomy. A mother can provide for her needs, and for those of her children, with relatively little male assistance. In fact, assistance comes just as much from her parents and their kin. So she will try to sponge off a large number of people, and if some of them become too hostile she can move on to another person. And if they all become hostile, the consequences aren't too catastrophic. She can still get by on her own.

This is a different situation from one where the mother is primarily dependent on one person, i.e., her husband. If she loses his support, she and her children may die. The consequences can be that catastrophic. So hysteria would be counterproductive. Either her husband might leave or his ability to support her might be harmed. It's like an employer who doesn't want to work his valued employees too hard because they cannot be easily replaced.

Are historically foraging indigenous American populations devoid of psychopathic traits – like say the Inuit?

Sociopathy (or psychopathy -- the words are almost synonymous) exists in all human populations because any strategy to eliminate it will never be 100% effective. My impression is that mental illness among the Inuit tends to be self-destructive. Suicide used to be very rare but now is very common.

could there also be entire groups who have evolved sociopathic strategies to exploit the vulnerabilities of a larger group whose society they live within as a minority?

You really want me to talk about Jews, don't you? Most human cultures show favoritism toward in-group members, and it's not just the Jews. Look at the American Supreme Court. A hundred years ago, all of the justices were White Protestants. Now, none of them are. This has not come about because White Protestants, as a group, have become progressively more and more stupid and thus unable to become judges. It's because they see themselves as rugged individualists and will not act collectively to defend their interests.

Rugged individualism works marvellously when everyone practices it. Unfortunately, most people in this imperfect world play by a different rule book. And it's not just the Jews. It's most folks. The Irish were very good at collective self-defence and self-boosting in their day.

You (stupidly) fail even to understand what Frost contends.

Please, I appreciate the compliment, but insults tend to make discussion difficult.

Very low IQ is an adaptation rather than a disase, but we recognize it as disabling.

It depends on the environment you have to function in. On a worldwide basis, I suspect that IQ correlates negatively with reproductive success.

If hysteria in women is a successful reproductive strategy, and if it’s the inheritance of this suite of genes that expresses itself as sociopathy in male offspring, this raises one very ominous point. It would mean that as far as Nature is concerned, male sociopaths are simply a side effect.

I don't follow your argument. Those male offspring will have children too, and their ability to sire a lot of children could be helped along by a psychopathic personality. Again, it depends on the culture the psychopath is living in.

It might be too simplistic to say that the surplus generated by agricultural societies enabled sociopathy. Wet rice farming required a high degree of organization at the village level.

I wouldn't say "enabled." I would say "created a greater potential for." What you say about wet rice farming is correct. In that case, there was strong selection for a collectivistic mindset:

So is the real question how big and how coherent our in-group is? Modern civilization attempts to dissolve traditional small-group loyalties and make us all good citizens of the state. But is the cost that we start to regard everyone else as out-group members?

This is what's happening with many white Americans. They have long had a weak sense of kinship while organizing themselves collectively at a broader community level. Unfortunately, those collective institutions have been either taken over by the government or forced to comply with principles of "fairness." As a result, they no longer have any way to defend themselves collectively.

This is not the case with other groups. They're used to organizing collectively at the level of the family or kin group. They feel no guilt or shame over favoritism because for them it's perfectly normal.

“Tay-Sachs is probably the best known “Jewish” disease. As many as one in 25 Ashkenazi Jews is a carrier of the defective recessive gene. Today, the majority of babies born with the disease are not Jewish.

Tay-Sachs does exist in other human populations, including French Canadians curious enough. Among Ashkenazi Jews and French Canadians, it's one of several unusually common disorders that cluster within the same metabolic pathway: lysosomal storage for brain tissues. It looks like the result of strong selection for intelligence over a relatively short time frame. In that kind of fast-track situation, selection will even favor alleles that are harmful when one inherits two copies of the same allele.

We’ve all but lost the concept of evil and, in turn, have rendered society incapable of confronting evil.

The concept of "evil" is still with us. It has simply been redefined. "Racists" are defined as evil and are given the treatment that was once reserved for rapists. In terms of social acceptance, it's probably better to be a rapist than a racist.

The philosophical idealism of Christianity gives each individual the tools to freely organize themselves into productive groups irrespective of clan. Genetics is old tech. Today philosophies drive genetics.

There are different branches of Christianity. Protestantism has gone the farthest down the road of individualism and renunciation of kinship ties.

As for genetics being "old tech," I wouldn't be so sure. For the moment, genes are still in the driver's seat.

Enjoyed the article and your replies immensely. Thanks.

“There is simply no female equivalent to male “cheater” strategies that would have been effective in the long run because of the high investment women need to make in their offspring.”

Except for pawning the kid off on someone else to raise.

One would think that psychopathic behavior arose mainly in the Alphas. They’re the ones who threatened or beat the crap out of challengers, who ate while others starved, who killed lower males offspring if they were “inconvenient”, who randomly bullied lower males, and who cajoled tribal members into surprise attacks on nearby tribes.

A former girlfried of mine could have been a sociopath, although, i’m not sure….i always thought the designation of “bitch” was adequate.
Anyway, the one thing i remember so well about our time together was her way of suggesting her lack of sympathy with anyones’- usually my – current plight. She would listen carefully, rear back, and in a grand voice claim: ” my heart pumps piss”
Now that’s “class” !

I’ve had a long interest in the general subject. Apart from any consideration of practical value, evolutionary psychology offers great insight into human diversity, and on a more personal level, how one has come to be who one is. The concept seemed to me quite easy to understand on first consideration 30 years ago, but the outcomes of evolution pertaining to psychology necessitate a rethink: While it is clear that the actual unit of survival & reproduction is the cell (cell splitting /sexual reproduction), what is the effective unit of survival & reproduction? The individual organism is the most obvious effective unit of survival & reproduction, but one comes to see that other levels (family, clan, colony/tribe) are also effective to lesser degrees. A colony of mice may survive and spin off other colonies or be entirely wiped out depending on how well it functions in a coordinated way (the supreme example being the highly coordinated function of cells of the multi-cellular organism).

As I understand it, the human virtues – honesty, empathy, courage, etc. – convey survival value to the tribe; they promote a more coordinated & efficient group effort. Considering that these traits of character must be accompanied along the course of emergence by defenses against advantage takers (as mentioned in the article) it’s quite a remarkable emergence – certainly it would have been difficult to predict ahead of time. Clearly, the setting that is needed is a harsh one – the outback: low population density, tribe vs. environment – that applies high selective pressure toward coordinated effort in obtaining food, building shelter, implementing new solutions to novel problems. Of course, evolution could occur only at a very slow rate if it were merely by way of natural selection acting upon tribal units. Here is perhaps where gene-culture co-evolution comes in: the virtues, as social values, factor into sorting out standing and status within the tribe. Thus the selection for traits conferring survival value to the tribal unit takes place at the level of individual.

That’s my look upon the general subject, as an enthusiast – happy to make this effort to set it down to text, as a form of personal exercise at the very least. Looking back, and then looking forward, it’s a remarkable turn of events to behold, don’t you think: The traits of character – empathy, disposition toward moral universalism, conscientiousness, high-investment parenting, iq, guilt, high trust and so forth – that brought into existence the world as we comfortably live it, have, with their most significant contribution to the civilized world, the social democratic State, put in place the environment of their own maladaptivity! Can it be that senescence comes also to human society?

An optimist would I suppose note how parochial one’s view is in all of this, in the grand scheme of things. With great savings one is given to excess, yet the sun stands ready to provide a steam of energy favorable to life on Earth for another billion years.

In terms of reproductive success, the golden age for sociopaths was the period stretching from the 1920s to the late 1960s. On the one hand, parent-supervised courtship ("calling") had given way to dating, thus making young women more accessible. Seduction itself became more positively viewed in popular culture (previously, it had been considered reprehensible and even a reason for incarceration). On the other hand, adoption of unwanted babies became much more common (before the 1920s, adoption by non-relatives was very rare in North America). So "cads" made plenty of babies and found plenty of takers for them.

Since the late 1960s, "cads" have been making fewer and fewer babies. Good girls are still having sex with bad boys but are now having fewer babies with them.

Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin.

That's how we see it, but that's not how they see it. Universal morality is not the rulebook that guides most people on this planet.

There is simply no female equivalent to male “cheater” strategies that would have been effective in the long run because of the high investment women need to make in their offspring.

In some societies, notably "tropical horticulturalists," women enjoy a high degree of reproductive autonomy. A mother can provide for her needs, and for those of her children, with relatively little male assistance. In fact, assistance comes just as much from her parents and their kin. So she will try to sponge off a large number of people, and if some of them become too hostile she can move on to another person. And if they all become hostile, the consequences aren't too catastrophic. She can still get by on her own.

This is a different situation from one where the mother is primarily dependent on one person, i.e., her husband. If she loses his support, she and her children may die. The consequences can be that catastrophic. So hysteria would be counterproductive. Either her husband might leave or his ability to support her might be harmed. It's like an employer who doesn't want to work his valued employees too hard because they cannot be easily replaced.

Are historically foraging indigenous American populations devoid of psychopathic traits – like say the Inuit?

Sociopathy (or psychopathy -- the words are almost synonymous) exists in all human populations because any strategy to eliminate it will never be 100% effective. My impression is that mental illness among the Inuit tends to be self-destructive. Suicide used to be very rare but now is very common.

could there also be entire groups who have evolved sociopathic strategies to exploit the vulnerabilities of a larger group whose society they live within as a minority?

You really want me to talk about Jews, don't you? Most human cultures show favoritism toward in-group members, and it's not just the Jews. Look at the American Supreme Court. A hundred years ago, all of the justices were White Protestants. Now, none of them are. This has not come about because White Protestants, as a group, have become progressively more and more stupid and thus unable to become judges. It's because they see themselves as rugged individualists and will not act collectively to defend their interests.

Rugged individualism works marvellously when everyone practices it. Unfortunately, most people in this imperfect world play by a different rule book. And it's not just the Jews. It's most folks. The Irish were very good at collective self-defence and self-boosting in their day.

You (stupidly) fail even to understand what Frost contends.

Please, I appreciate the compliment, but insults tend to make discussion difficult.

Very low IQ is an adaptation rather than a disase, but we recognize it as disabling.

It depends on the environment you have to function in. On a worldwide basis, I suspect that IQ correlates negatively with reproductive success.

If hysteria in women is a successful reproductive strategy, and if it’s the inheritance of this suite of genes that expresses itself as sociopathy in male offspring, this raises one very ominous point. It would mean that as far as Nature is concerned, male sociopaths are simply a side effect.

I don't follow your argument. Those male offspring will have children too, and their ability to sire a lot of children could be helped along by a psychopathic personality. Again, it depends on the culture the psychopath is living in.

It might be too simplistic to say that the surplus generated by agricultural societies enabled sociopathy. Wet rice farming required a high degree of organization at the village level.

I wouldn't say "enabled." I would say "created a greater potential for." What you say about wet rice farming is correct. In that case, there was strong selection for a collectivistic mindset:

So is the real question how big and how coherent our in-group is? Modern civilization attempts to dissolve traditional small-group loyalties and make us all good citizens of the state. But is the cost that we start to regard everyone else as out-group members?

This is what's happening with many white Americans. They have long had a weak sense of kinship while organizing themselves collectively at a broader community level. Unfortunately, those collective institutions have been either taken over by the government or forced to comply with principles of "fairness." As a result, they no longer have any way to defend themselves collectively.

This is not the case with other groups. They're used to organizing collectively at the level of the family or kin group. They feel no guilt or shame over favoritism because for them it's perfectly normal.

“Tay-Sachs is probably the best known “Jewish” disease. As many as one in 25 Ashkenazi Jews is a carrier of the defective recessive gene. Today, the majority of babies born with the disease are not Jewish.

Tay-Sachs does exist in other human populations, including French Canadians curious enough. Among Ashkenazi Jews and French Canadians, it's one of several unusually common disorders that cluster within the same metabolic pathway: lysosomal storage for brain tissues. It looks like the result of strong selection for intelligence over a relatively short time frame. In that kind of fast-track situation, selection will even favor alleles that are harmful when one inherits two copies of the same allele.

We’ve all but lost the concept of evil and, in turn, have rendered society incapable of confronting evil.

The concept of "evil" is still with us. It has simply been redefined. "Racists" are defined as evil and are given the treatment that was once reserved for rapists. In terms of social acceptance, it's probably better to be a rapist than a racist.

The philosophical idealism of Christianity gives each individual the tools to freely organize themselves into productive groups irrespective of clan. Genetics is old tech. Today philosophies drive genetics.

There are different branches of Christianity. Protestantism has gone the farthest down the road of individualism and renunciation of kinship ties.

As for genetics being "old tech," I wouldn't be so sure. For the moment, genes are still in the driver's seat.

Hi Peter,

I’ve follow your articles with keen anticipation (they map to what I have believed assumed/believed for decades as an amateur socio-biologist who accounts differences in races and cultures to evolutionary adaptation to the three BioZones).

Questions: That said, do you believe that Calvinism in its evolution from low-kinship and an internalization of moral and religious rules has fostered individualism in extremis to the point that it can no longer be the ground for holding a society together? In other words, demarcate radical individualism and its modern corrolate that all “rules” are now personal choices — a radical relativism — and one has moral and social anarchy instead of an homogenous culture based on the internalization of a specific set of moral precepts. Has Calvanistic individualism evoled into a “universalization” that now potentially includes all rules and behaviors such that if there is still a sense of guilt associated with beliefs and behaviors, it is the sense of guilt that follows from NOT accepting that universalization?

Kick the psychopaths out and keep them out. That alone will end government. There are 7.3 billion people – psychopaths are needed only as role models for aspiring psychopaths. Once only the civilized are left, use insurance for property loss and commercial transactions, use private fire and security protection, use arbitration for settling disputes, and create new businesses for new problems.

It’s not quite that simple. Psychopathy/sociopathy is the far end of a behavioral continuum. At what point on that continuum do we draw the line? How psychopathic does someone have to be before we kick him/her out? And where do we kick them?

The general thinking is that psychopathy/sociopathy is caused by a low level of affective empathy combined with a high level of cognitive empathy. In other words, a sociopath is someone who understands how other people feel, and understands how his actions affect other people, but who feels no grief if he hurts other people either on purpose or inadvertently.

If we use that definition, it follows that most people on this planet are psychopaths. They don’t have enough affective empathy to function in a high-trust society.

Your other suggestions have merit. I’m not an ideologue. I believe that ideas should be tried out, preferably on a small scale, before being adopted. Also, something that works well in small-town New England might not work well in another culture. Each culture has to work out its own solutions.

what is the effective unit of survival & reproduction?

The primary unit is the individual, but there are cases where selection can operate on groups. The “haystack model” is a good example of group selection. In that model, groups are regularly dissolved and reformed, typically on a seasonal basis. Within any one group, altruists lose out to “cheaters”, but groups with high proportions of altruists do better than groups with low proportions. So altruistic traits can be favored within the gene pool as a whole.

I believe that the complex of behaviors we see in Northwest Europeans (high affective empathy, high guilt proneness, susceptibility to universal/absolute moralism) has its origins in the Mesolithic fisher/hunters of the North Sea and Baltic. These were unusual hunter-gatherers in the sense that they formed very large seasonal communities along the coast during the summer and then broke up into smaller hunting bands for the winter. Thus, during the summer they had to interact mostly with non-kin in a context that demanded much cooperative effort and a minimum of conflict.

In my opinion, this is where it started, but there are other writers, like HBD chick, who see it starting in the spread of manoralism during the early Middle Ages. Others point to the Indo-Europeans, but I don’t understand how that explanation would tie in with the Hajnal line.

Can it be that senescence comes also to human society?

Not senescence. It’s just that circumstances change, and people don’t always adapt to new circumstances. What worked very well in one setting might not work so well in another.

I grew up in a rural, WASPy, Christian environment, and I know that culture, all the more so because my mother was a Christian fundamentalist. I know what it means to live in a high-trust society, and I like the people who create that kind of society. Nonetheless, I feel like an outsider among them. Perhaps that’s just the way I am.

From time to time, I encounter people from other cultures, often of Jewish or Hindu background, who see what is happening and ask me if I can “open their eyes” — as if I have some special power as an insider. Yet, to be honest, I don’t feel like an insider.

do you believe that Calvinism in its evolution from low-kinship and an internalization of moral and religious rules has fostered individualism in extremis to the point that it can no longer be the ground for holding a society together?

Calvinism is one point in a process of cultural evolution. In other words, the weak kinship and strong individualism of Northwest Europeans caused them to modify Christianity after they adopted it, thus causing it to become more based on concepts like atonement, guilt, and original sin. They thus transformed Western Christianity and eventually broke away from it via the Reformation.

Protestantism helped Northwest Europeans to pursue a path of cultural evolution that took them farther and father away from kinship and closer towards new ways of organizing social relations, notably the market economy. Eventually, Protestantism moved beyond Protestantism, just as it had earlier moved beyond Western Christianity. We’re living today in a kind of post-Protestantism — a hyper-universal, hyper-individualistic outlook that has emancipated itself from its original Christian framework.

In other words, demarcate radical individualism and its modern corrolate that all “rules” are now personal choices — a radical relativism — and one has moral and social anarchy instead of an homogenous culture based on the internalization of a specific set of moral precepts.

I agree. When individualism and universalism become freed from all constraints, we get an ideology that can only be self-destructive. Almost by definition. Yet people—especially Northwest Europeans—don’t see it because these values are so central not only to the current ideological environment but also to their own predispositions.

As far as solutions go, probably the only thing we can do is to keep on "doin what comes natcher'ly."

http://www.unz.com/pfrost/in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time/

Maybe in some brave new world we will be able to approach the problem with wisdom and logic, but we are no where near that time yet. As of now the only thing government can do is punish crime. That we have lost the will to do so is a real problem that time and necessity will solve.

In my opinion, this is where it started, but there are other writers, like HBD chick, who see it starting in the spread of manoralism during the early Middle Ages. Others point to the Indo-Europeans, but I don’t understand how that explanation would tie in with the Hajnal line.

You don't see how a patriarchal warrior culture might select for altruism, which later on might be expressed in various ways in large societies? Or how large communities that involve cooperation and little conflict might not necessarily have much to do with altruism or select for it?

See W.D. Hamilton's paper "Innate Social Aptitudes of Man":

"The incursions of barbaric pastoralists seem to do civilizations less harm in the long run than one might expect. Indeed, two dark ages and renaissances in Europe suggest a recurring pattern in which a renaissance follows an incursion by about 800 years. It may even be suggested that certain genes or traditions of pastoralists revitalize the conquered people with an ingredient of progress which tends to die out in a large panmictic population for the reasons already discussed. I have in mind altruism itself, or the part of the altruism which is perhaps better described as self-sacrificial daring. By the time of the renaissance it may be that the mixing of genes and cultures (or of cultures alone if these are the only vehicles, which I doubt) has continued long enough to bring the old mercantile thoughtfulness and the infused daring into conjunction in a few individuals who then find courage for all kinds of inventive innovation against the resistance of established thought and practice. Often, however, the cost in fitness of such altruism and sublimated pugnacity to the individuals concerned is by no means metaphorical, and the benefits to fitness, such as they are, go to a mass of individuals whose genetic correlation with the innovator must be slight indeed. Thus civilization probably slowly reduces its altruism of all kinds, including the kinds needed for cultural creativity (see also Eshel 1972)."

The general thinking is that psychopathy/sociopathy is caused by a low level of affective empathy combined with a high level of cognitive empathy. In other words, a sociopath is someone who understands how other people feel, and understands how his actions affect other people, but who feels no grief if he hurts other people either on purpose or inadvertently.

Other more uncommon traits: fearlessness, extreme goal orientation thus behavior hardly affected by punishment. Or is that also connected to the lack of affective empathy? Is a psychopath unable to care about his own suffering?

If you show scary images to psychopaths their skin conductivity change will look quite different. Kevin Dutton from the UK has done some research on this, also wrote a popular book.

In regards to 'hysteria', there is this paper:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3323706/

"Borderline Personality Disorder as a Female Phenotypic Expression of Psychopathy?"

I looked it up after reading psychopath blogs - they claim they really like borderline women, as they are more easily persuaded to do really wild things, and are less boring due to all the rapid mood swings. Also, borderline women are very manipulative, and in many ways resemble psychopaths, but they're generally unhappy. Or at least appear to be unhappy.

In his important first chapter, to which he gives the unapologetic title “Who We Are,” Willetts explains the “deep features” that have distinguished England, and its overseas offshoots, from the rest of the world.

England has been “not just different from Papua New Guinea or Pakistan; it is also quite different from France and Italy and most of Continental Europe,” except for Holland and Denmark.

And this difference dates to at least 1250—and perhaps back to (or beyond) the Dark Age days of King Canute. [...] “Instead, think of England as being like this for at least 750 years. We live in small families. We buy and sell houses. … Our parents expect us to leave home for paid work …You try to save up some money from your wages so that you can afford to get married. … You can choose your spouse … It takes a long time to build up some savings from your work and find the right person with whom to settle down, so marriage comes quite lately, possibly in your late twenties.“

When individualism and universalism become freed from all constraints, we get an ideology that can only be self-destructive. Almost by definition

I suppose you can back to Zoroaster and Manichaeism as the antecedents of Christianity. Even protestant countries have big differences. Liberalism may be hyper individualistic in some ways but it is also a unified different tradition, with its own set of assumptions as starting points for reasoning.

Sins of the west? Infanticide of actual already born babies was/is normal practice over vast regions of the East to this day. Mohammed forbade it among his Arab converts, whose people used to bury daughters alive in the sand. Among certain Indian castes, no girls at all were raised , and wives were sought from among castes who were less thorough in that way. This is not an exaggeration, or reference to an arcane practice. I just read an article a few years ago in an Indian publication, describing this and interviewing people who had done it.

Historically, Jews (from what I've read), and surprisingly even Muslims, gave the decision to the pregnant woman, for as long as the fetus is dependent on her, she is the deciding factor. But I am not a theological expert on those religions. Hindus forbade it, believing it was like striking the husband. But considering how fast and loose they were about female infanticide, I don't take their ban on abortion seriously. Christian "doctors of the church" thought little of terminating a pregnancy as long as "quickening" had not yet occurred. That can be subjective. Strong opinion against it became writ in law during the 19th century (where 20% of all pregnancies were deliberately terminated) probably because it became easier with the invention of anesthesia.

So abortion is not some singular sin of the "west", whatever one's opinion of it. Certainly not of the "west."

Poppy,

You read my comment as if I had said, “sins found exclusively in the West.”

I didn’t. There are, or have been, civilizations with features more depraved than ours. That exonerates nobody.

Further, if the slip-slidin’ West persists in defining evil as two standard deviations beneath some ever-declining global norm, we’ll soon arrive in a condition where everyone is doing the worst thing he can think of just to keep up with the neighbors. So here’s a captive… shall I burn him alive or behead him and post the fun on Youtube?

Yes, perhaps I jumped too quickly. Result of years of indoctrination by the MSM & academia on the sins and evils of the "west", which virtually every poor person in the world seems to think will give them a better life.

Kick the psychopaths out and keep them out. That alone will end government. There are 7.3 billion people – psychopaths are needed only as role models for aspiring psychopaths. Once only the civilized are left, use insurance for property loss and commercial transactions, use private fire and security protection, use arbitration for settling disputes, and create new businesses for new problems.

It's not quite that simple. Psychopathy/sociopathy is the far end of a behavioral continuum. At what point on that continuum do we draw the line? How psychopathic does someone have to be before we kick him/her out? And where do we kick them?

The general thinking is that psychopathy/sociopathy is caused by a low level of affective empathy combined with a high level of cognitive empathy. In other words, a sociopath is someone who understands how other people feel, and understands how his actions affect other people, but who feels no grief if he hurts other people either on purpose or inadvertently.

If we use that definition, it follows that most people on this planet are psychopaths. They don't have enough affective empathy to function in a high-trust society.

Your other suggestions have merit. I'm not an ideologue. I believe that ideas should be tried out, preferably on a small scale, before being adopted. Also, something that works well in small-town New England might not work well in another culture. Each culture has to work out its own solutions.

what is the effective unit of survival & reproduction?

The primary unit is the individual, but there are cases where selection can operate on groups. The "haystack model" is a good example of group selection. In that model, groups are regularly dissolved and reformed, typically on a seasonal basis. Within any one group, altruists lose out to "cheaters", but groups with high proportions of altruists do better than groups with low proportions. So altruistic traits can be favored within the gene pool as a whole.

I believe that the complex of behaviors we see in Northwest Europeans (high affective empathy, high guilt proneness, susceptibility to universal/absolute moralism) has its origins in the Mesolithic fisher/hunters of the North Sea and Baltic. These were unusual hunter-gatherers in the sense that they formed very large seasonal communities along the coast during the summer and then broke up into smaller hunting bands for the winter. Thus, during the summer they had to interact mostly with non-kin in a context that demanded much cooperative effort and a minimum of conflict.

In my opinion, this is where it started, but there are other writers, like HBD chick, who see it starting in the spread of manoralism during the early Middle Ages. Others point to the Indo-Europeans, but I don't understand how that explanation would tie in with the Hajnal line.

Can it be that senescence comes also to human society?

Not senescence. It's just that circumstances change, and people don't always adapt to new circumstances. What worked very well in one setting might not work so well in another.

I grew up in a rural, WASPy, Christian environment, and I know that culture, all the more so because my mother was a Christian fundamentalist. I know what it means to live in a high-trust society, and I like the people who create that kind of society. Nonetheless, I feel like an outsider among them. Perhaps that's just the way I am.

From time to time, I encounter people from other cultures, often of Jewish or Hindu background, who see what is happening and ask me if I can "open their eyes" -- as if I have some special power as an insider. Yet, to be honest, I don't feel like an insider.

do you believe that Calvinism in its evolution from low-kinship and an internalization of moral and religious rules has fostered individualism in extremis to the point that it can no longer be the ground for holding a society together?

Calvinism is one point in a process of cultural evolution. In other words, the weak kinship and strong individualism of Northwest Europeans caused them to modify Christianity after they adopted it, thus causing it to become more based on concepts like atonement, guilt, and original sin. They thus transformed Western Christianity and eventually broke away from it via the Reformation.

Protestantism helped Northwest Europeans to pursue a path of cultural evolution that took them farther and father away from kinship and closer towards new ways of organizing social relations, notably the market economy. Eventually, Protestantism moved beyond Protestantism, just as it had earlier moved beyond Western Christianity. We're living today in a kind of post-Protestantism -- a hyper-universal, hyper-individualistic outlook that has emancipated itself from its original Christian framework.

In other words, demarcate radical individualism and its modern corrolate that all “rules” are now personal choices — a radical relativism — and one has moral and social anarchy instead of an homogenous culture based on the internalization of a specific set of moral precepts.

I agree. When individualism and universalism become freed from all constraints, we get an ideology that can only be self-destructive. Almost by definition. Yet people—especially Northwest Europeans—don't see it because these values are so central not only to the current ideological environment but also to their own predispositions.

It will take a combination of calm, reasoned argument ... and "events."

As far as solutions go, probably the only thing we can do is to keep on “doin what comes natcher’ly.”

Maybe in some brave new world we will be able to approach the problem with wisdom and logic, but we are no where near that time yet. As of now the only thing government can do is punish crime. That we have lost the will to do so is a real problem that time and necessity will solve.

Are you suggesting that evil is an objective category or concept and one with a meaning and set of possible applications that anyone can be taught?

Is it not a mere word applied to the aspect or aspects of which one is aware (or thinks one can guess at reliably) of some chain of events? And do you suggest that there is some objective way of determining the necessary connection between the (necessarily partial and selectively) apprehended facts and the application of the "evil" label?

Take your characterisation of abortion as "murder" as your test case. Do you not recognise that this is a result of cultural determination that many have escaped from without any help from medicalisation? Whether it is given to you by Catholic or evangelical Protestant, Orthodox Jewish or Muslim faith it is after all, is it not, a belief given to you without benefit of scientific or analytical reasoning. Otherwise why would you appropriate a term with a clear enough legal meaning, namely "murder", and use it inaccurately for mere rhetoric.

OK some people's religion makes them get as upset by an abortion as by executing an innocent man or woman (more upset it often seems). Why should that count in aid of attempts at rational argument when all it tells me of any substance is that maybe you should be put on the FBI's terrorist watch list - family planning clinic division?

Thanks, Wiz. If I understood your post, you appear to be making my point for me. Gee, those people over there did more of this so-called Bad Stuff than we did. So how could it be objectively wrong? By such a standard, everyone would be guilty… and we know that can’t be true!

Such is the mindset in a civilization that rejects the idea that there are such things as moral facts.

And yet, if somebody broke into your home tonight and did violence to you and your family, you’d have no qualms about defining that as an evil act. But to use such a word necessarily infers a pre-existing standard.

In a lame attempt to hobble out of a mess of contradictions, people hit on the medical idea of the soul. It’s just blame-shifting with a big vocabulary. It doesn’t work, and the culture-wide moral evasion is creating a situation far worse than just admitting the ugly truth: Standards exist; they’re objective and independent of our thinking, and we’re pretty much all guilty of having violated them.

A precondition for solving any problem is admitting what the problem is. Where we go from there is a discussion for another day.

Kick the psychopaths out and keep them out. That alone will end government. There are 7.3 billion people – psychopaths are needed only as role models for aspiring psychopaths. Once only the civilized are left, use insurance for property loss and commercial transactions, use private fire and security protection, use arbitration for settling disputes, and create new businesses for new problems.

It's not quite that simple. Psychopathy/sociopathy is the far end of a behavioral continuum. At what point on that continuum do we draw the line? How psychopathic does someone have to be before we kick him/her out? And where do we kick them?

The general thinking is that psychopathy/sociopathy is caused by a low level of affective empathy combined with a high level of cognitive empathy. In other words, a sociopath is someone who understands how other people feel, and understands how his actions affect other people, but who feels no grief if he hurts other people either on purpose or inadvertently.

If we use that definition, it follows that most people on this planet are psychopaths. They don't have enough affective empathy to function in a high-trust society.

Your other suggestions have merit. I'm not an ideologue. I believe that ideas should be tried out, preferably on a small scale, before being adopted. Also, something that works well in small-town New England might not work well in another culture. Each culture has to work out its own solutions.

what is the effective unit of survival & reproduction?

The primary unit is the individual, but there are cases where selection can operate on groups. The "haystack model" is a good example of group selection. In that model, groups are regularly dissolved and reformed, typically on a seasonal basis. Within any one group, altruists lose out to "cheaters", but groups with high proportions of altruists do better than groups with low proportions. So altruistic traits can be favored within the gene pool as a whole.

I believe that the complex of behaviors we see in Northwest Europeans (high affective empathy, high guilt proneness, susceptibility to universal/absolute moralism) has its origins in the Mesolithic fisher/hunters of the North Sea and Baltic. These were unusual hunter-gatherers in the sense that they formed very large seasonal communities along the coast during the summer and then broke up into smaller hunting bands for the winter. Thus, during the summer they had to interact mostly with non-kin in a context that demanded much cooperative effort and a minimum of conflict.

In my opinion, this is where it started, but there are other writers, like HBD chick, who see it starting in the spread of manoralism during the early Middle Ages. Others point to the Indo-Europeans, but I don't understand how that explanation would tie in with the Hajnal line.

Can it be that senescence comes also to human society?

Not senescence. It's just that circumstances change, and people don't always adapt to new circumstances. What worked very well in one setting might not work so well in another.

I grew up in a rural, WASPy, Christian environment, and I know that culture, all the more so because my mother was a Christian fundamentalist. I know what it means to live in a high-trust society, and I like the people who create that kind of society. Nonetheless, I feel like an outsider among them. Perhaps that's just the way I am.

From time to time, I encounter people from other cultures, often of Jewish or Hindu background, who see what is happening and ask me if I can "open their eyes" -- as if I have some special power as an insider. Yet, to be honest, I don't feel like an insider.

do you believe that Calvinism in its evolution from low-kinship and an internalization of moral and religious rules has fostered individualism in extremis to the point that it can no longer be the ground for holding a society together?

Calvinism is one point in a process of cultural evolution. In other words, the weak kinship and strong individualism of Northwest Europeans caused them to modify Christianity after they adopted it, thus causing it to become more based on concepts like atonement, guilt, and original sin. They thus transformed Western Christianity and eventually broke away from it via the Reformation.

Protestantism helped Northwest Europeans to pursue a path of cultural evolution that took them farther and father away from kinship and closer towards new ways of organizing social relations, notably the market economy. Eventually, Protestantism moved beyond Protestantism, just as it had earlier moved beyond Western Christianity. We're living today in a kind of post-Protestantism -- a hyper-universal, hyper-individualistic outlook that has emancipated itself from its original Christian framework.

In other words, demarcate radical individualism and its modern corrolate that all “rules” are now personal choices — a radical relativism — and one has moral and social anarchy instead of an homogenous culture based on the internalization of a specific set of moral precepts.

I agree. When individualism and universalism become freed from all constraints, we get an ideology that can only be self-destructive. Almost by definition. Yet people—especially Northwest Europeans—don't see it because these values are so central not only to the current ideological environment but also to their own predispositions.

It will take a combination of calm, reasoned argument ... and "events."

In my opinion, this is where it started, but there are other writers, like HBD chick, who see it starting in the spread of manoralism during the early Middle Ages. Others point to the Indo-Europeans, but I don’t understand how that explanation would tie in with the Hajnal line.

You don’t see how a patriarchal warrior culture might select for altruism, which later on might be expressed in various ways in large societies? Or how large communities that involve cooperation and little conflict might not necessarily have much to do with altruism or select for it?

See W.D. Hamilton’s paper “Innate Social Aptitudes of Man”:

“The incursions of barbaric pastoralists seem to do civilizations less harm in the long run than one might expect. Indeed, two dark ages and renaissances in Europe suggest a recurring pattern in which a renaissance follows an incursion by about 800 years. It may even be suggested that certain genes or traditions of pastoralists revitalize the conquered people with an ingredient of progress which tends to die out in a large panmictic population for the reasons already discussed. I have in mind altruism itself, or the part of the altruism which is perhaps better described as self-sacrificial daring. By the time of the renaissance it may be that the mixing of genes and cultures (or of cultures alone if these are the only vehicles, which I doubt) has continued long enough to bring the old mercantile thoughtfulness and the infused daring into conjunction in a few individuals who then find courage for all kinds of inventive innovation against the resistance of established thought and practice. Often, however, the cost in fitness of such altruism and sublimated pugnacity to the individuals concerned is by no means metaphorical, and the benefits to fitness, such as they are, go to a mass of individuals whose genetic correlation with the innovator must be slight indeed. Thus civilization probably slowly reduces its altruism of all kinds, including the kinds needed for cultural creativity (see also Eshel 1972).”

I don’t know if sociopathy is an “illness” but I do know that most authorities consider alcoholism a disease and based on my own research which I summarized on pages 114-118 of my 1994 book Vessels of Rage (in a chapter entitled “Alcoholism Kills”) Ted Bundy was an active alcoholic during his killing years.

One intended victim who escaped told police Bundy had “smelled of liquor”; on his most murderous night, when he invaded a Florida sorority house and bludgeoned four victims, killing two of them, a witness told police he had been “drunk.” In the days before he was finally caught he was observed driving while drunk and was “drunk and disoriented” when arrested. He even continued to drink while on Death Row (the woman he had married smuggled vodka); one of his lawyer’s investigators said he was drunk during a prison interview.

Other serial killers I judged to have been alcoholics include John Gacy (who, like Bundy, was inebriated when arrested), Jeffrey Dahmer, Henry Lee Lucas, Bobby Joe Long, Gary Schaefer Wayne Henley and Dean Corll. Richard Speck who killed eight nurses in a couple of hours was a mass murderer, not a serial killer, but he too was an alcoholic. Like Bundy, he continued boozing in prison.

As has been said by others, alcoholism kills the superego (or if you prefer, the conscience) which I suppose is one way of saying it causes sociopathy.

Kick the psychopaths out and keep them out. That alone will end government. There are 7.3 billion people – psychopaths are needed only as role models for aspiring psychopaths. Once only the civilized are left, use insurance for property loss and commercial transactions, use private fire and security protection, use arbitration for settling disputes, and create new businesses for new problems.

It's not quite that simple. Psychopathy/sociopathy is the far end of a behavioral continuum. At what point on that continuum do we draw the line? How psychopathic does someone have to be before we kick him/her out? And where do we kick them?

The general thinking is that psychopathy/sociopathy is caused by a low level of affective empathy combined with a high level of cognitive empathy. In other words, a sociopath is someone who understands how other people feel, and understands how his actions affect other people, but who feels no grief if he hurts other people either on purpose or inadvertently.

If we use that definition, it follows that most people on this planet are psychopaths. They don't have enough affective empathy to function in a high-trust society.

Your other suggestions have merit. I'm not an ideologue. I believe that ideas should be tried out, preferably on a small scale, before being adopted. Also, something that works well in small-town New England might not work well in another culture. Each culture has to work out its own solutions.

what is the effective unit of survival & reproduction?

The primary unit is the individual, but there are cases where selection can operate on groups. The "haystack model" is a good example of group selection. In that model, groups are regularly dissolved and reformed, typically on a seasonal basis. Within any one group, altruists lose out to "cheaters", but groups with high proportions of altruists do better than groups with low proportions. So altruistic traits can be favored within the gene pool as a whole.

I believe that the complex of behaviors we see in Northwest Europeans (high affective empathy, high guilt proneness, susceptibility to universal/absolute moralism) has its origins in the Mesolithic fisher/hunters of the North Sea and Baltic. These were unusual hunter-gatherers in the sense that they formed very large seasonal communities along the coast during the summer and then broke up into smaller hunting bands for the winter. Thus, during the summer they had to interact mostly with non-kin in a context that demanded much cooperative effort and a minimum of conflict.

In my opinion, this is where it started, but there are other writers, like HBD chick, who see it starting in the spread of manoralism during the early Middle Ages. Others point to the Indo-Europeans, but I don't understand how that explanation would tie in with the Hajnal line.

Can it be that senescence comes also to human society?

Not senescence. It's just that circumstances change, and people don't always adapt to new circumstances. What worked very well in one setting might not work so well in another.

I grew up in a rural, WASPy, Christian environment, and I know that culture, all the more so because my mother was a Christian fundamentalist. I know what it means to live in a high-trust society, and I like the people who create that kind of society. Nonetheless, I feel like an outsider among them. Perhaps that's just the way I am.

From time to time, I encounter people from other cultures, often of Jewish or Hindu background, who see what is happening and ask me if I can "open their eyes" -- as if I have some special power as an insider. Yet, to be honest, I don't feel like an insider.

do you believe that Calvinism in its evolution from low-kinship and an internalization of moral and religious rules has fostered individualism in extremis to the point that it can no longer be the ground for holding a society together?

Calvinism is one point in a process of cultural evolution. In other words, the weak kinship and strong individualism of Northwest Europeans caused them to modify Christianity after they adopted it, thus causing it to become more based on concepts like atonement, guilt, and original sin. They thus transformed Western Christianity and eventually broke away from it via the Reformation.

Protestantism helped Northwest Europeans to pursue a path of cultural evolution that took them farther and father away from kinship and closer towards new ways of organizing social relations, notably the market economy. Eventually, Protestantism moved beyond Protestantism, just as it had earlier moved beyond Western Christianity. We're living today in a kind of post-Protestantism -- a hyper-universal, hyper-individualistic outlook that has emancipated itself from its original Christian framework.

In other words, demarcate radical individualism and its modern corrolate that all “rules” are now personal choices — a radical relativism — and one has moral and social anarchy instead of an homogenous culture based on the internalization of a specific set of moral precepts.

I agree. When individualism and universalism become freed from all constraints, we get an ideology that can only be self-destructive. Almost by definition. Yet people—especially Northwest Europeans—don't see it because these values are so central not only to the current ideological environment but also to their own predispositions.

It will take a combination of calm, reasoned argument ... and "events."

The general thinking is that psychopathy/sociopathy is caused by a low level of affective empathy combined with a high level of cognitive empathy. In other words, a sociopath is someone who understands how other people feel, and understands how his actions affect other people, but who feels no grief if he hurts other people either on purpose or inadvertently.

Other more uncommon traits: fearlessness, extreme goal orientation thus behavior hardly affected by punishment. Or is that also connected to the lack of affective empathy? Is a psychopath unable to care about his own suffering?

If you show scary images to psychopaths their skin conductivity change will look quite different. Kevin Dutton from the UK has done some research on this, also wrote a popular book.

“Borderline Personality Disorder as a Female Phenotypic Expression of Psychopathy?”

I looked it up after reading psychopath blogs – they claim they really like borderline women, as they are more easily persuaded to do really wild things, and are less boring due to all the rapid mood swings. Also, borderline women are very manipulative, and in many ways resemble psychopaths, but they’re generally unhappy. Or at least appear to be unhappy.

Yes. This is adaptive if the psychopath's social environment tends to under-punish transgressive behaviors, which in turn it rationally would do if the typical transgression of a typical perpetrator is more of a correctable error of individual judgement than strategic behavior.

I don't know if sociopathy is an "illness" but I do know that most authorities consider alcoholism a disease and based on my own research which I summarized on pages 114-118 of my 1994 book Vessels of Rage (in a chapter entitled "Alcoholism Kills") Ted Bundy was an active alcoholic during his killing years.

One intended victim who escaped told police Bundy had "smelled of liquor"; on his most murderous night, when he invaded a Florida sorority house and bludgeoned four victims, killing two of them, a witness told police he had been "drunk." In the days before he was finally caught he was observed driving while drunk and was "drunk and disoriented" when arrested. He even continued to drink while on Death Row (the woman he had married smuggled vodka); one of his lawyer's investigators said he was drunk during a prison interview.

Other serial killers I judged to have been alcoholics include John Gacy (who, like Bundy, was inebriated when arrested), Jeffrey Dahmer, Henry Lee Lucas, Bobby Joe Long, Gary Schaefer Wayne Henley and Dean Corll. Richard Speck who killed eight nurses in a couple of hours was a mass murderer, not a serial killer, but he too was an alcoholic. Like Bundy, he continued boozing in prison.

As has been said by others, alcoholism kills the superego (or if you prefer, the conscience) which I suppose is one way of saying it causes sociopathy.

But did they have children? Serial killers with a lot of children would be evidence for being not sick but selfish from a genetic point of view. Bundy was rather good looking.

Emblematic says,"...could there also be entire groups who have evolved sociopathic strategies to exploit the vulnerabilities of a larger group whose society they live within as a minority?"

The Jews are a tribe of psychopaths. No all maybe not even the majority but a large number. All of the Jews ancient writings are nothing more than a manual for psychopaths to live by. The Talmud is nothing but one psychopathic thought after another. The Talmud “great enlightenment” basically says that everyone not Jewish is there to serve Jews. All their property is really the Jews. No one is really human unless they're Jews and their lives don’t matter. A psychopathic religion for a psychopathic people.

They've been thrown out of every single country that they've been to in any numbers. Psychopaths having no empathy themselves can only go by the feedback they get from the people they are exploiting. So they push and push to see what they can get away with. The normal people build up resentment towards them. Thinking “surely they will reform or repent” like a normal person who does wrong. Of course the Jews do not. They don’t have the mental process for reform. Then in a huge mass outpouring of hate for the Jews, fed up with the refusal to reform their behavior, they attack and/or deport them. In this stage of the cycle the Big/Rich Jews escape and the little Jews are attacked.

Start over.

Henry Kissinger's quote, "Any people who have been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong".

The Jews are a tribe of psychopaths

No, they’re not.

Here’s a little hypothetical prediction: If we developed a perfect brain scan test for psychopathy and subjected CEOs and politicians and other “elites” to it, we’d identify many of the gentiles and few of the jews as psychopaths.

Maybe it helps to think of Bernie Madoff. He may be a psychopath. He scammed fellow Jews. Most Jews don’t do that… because they’re not psychopaths.

"... If we developed a perfect brain scan test for psychopathy and subjected CEOs and politicians and other “elites” to it, we’d identify many of the gentiles and few of the jews as psychopaths..."

You of course take a specific limited population of Gentiles and compare it to all Jews. Your comparison is dishonest. Typical of the sneaky lying way that counts for "information" in our debased country. Percentage wise the Jews would be off the charts compared to Gentiles, OF THE GENERAL POPULATION.

Kick the psychopaths out and keep them out. That alone will end government. There are 7.3 billion people – psychopaths are needed only as role models for aspiring psychopaths. Once only the civilized are left, use insurance for property loss and commercial transactions, use private fire and security protection, use arbitration for settling disputes, and create new businesses for new problems.

It's not quite that simple. Psychopathy/sociopathy is the far end of a behavioral continuum. At what point on that continuum do we draw the line? How psychopathic does someone have to be before we kick him/her out? And where do we kick them?

The general thinking is that psychopathy/sociopathy is caused by a low level of affective empathy combined with a high level of cognitive empathy. In other words, a sociopath is someone who understands how other people feel, and understands how his actions affect other people, but who feels no grief if he hurts other people either on purpose or inadvertently.

If we use that definition, it follows that most people on this planet are psychopaths. They don't have enough affective empathy to function in a high-trust society.

Your other suggestions have merit. I'm not an ideologue. I believe that ideas should be tried out, preferably on a small scale, before being adopted. Also, something that works well in small-town New England might not work well in another culture. Each culture has to work out its own solutions.

what is the effective unit of survival & reproduction?

The primary unit is the individual, but there are cases where selection can operate on groups. The "haystack model" is a good example of group selection. In that model, groups are regularly dissolved and reformed, typically on a seasonal basis. Within any one group, altruists lose out to "cheaters", but groups with high proportions of altruists do better than groups with low proportions. So altruistic traits can be favored within the gene pool as a whole.

I believe that the complex of behaviors we see in Northwest Europeans (high affective empathy, high guilt proneness, susceptibility to universal/absolute moralism) has its origins in the Mesolithic fisher/hunters of the North Sea and Baltic. These were unusual hunter-gatherers in the sense that they formed very large seasonal communities along the coast during the summer and then broke up into smaller hunting bands for the winter. Thus, during the summer they had to interact mostly with non-kin in a context that demanded much cooperative effort and a minimum of conflict.

In my opinion, this is where it started, but there are other writers, like HBD chick, who see it starting in the spread of manoralism during the early Middle Ages. Others point to the Indo-Europeans, but I don't understand how that explanation would tie in with the Hajnal line.

Can it be that senescence comes also to human society?

Not senescence. It's just that circumstances change, and people don't always adapt to new circumstances. What worked very well in one setting might not work so well in another.

I grew up in a rural, WASPy, Christian environment, and I know that culture, all the more so because my mother was a Christian fundamentalist. I know what it means to live in a high-trust society, and I like the people who create that kind of society. Nonetheless, I feel like an outsider among them. Perhaps that's just the way I am.

From time to time, I encounter people from other cultures, often of Jewish or Hindu background, who see what is happening and ask me if I can "open their eyes" -- as if I have some special power as an insider. Yet, to be honest, I don't feel like an insider.

do you believe that Calvinism in its evolution from low-kinship and an internalization of moral and religious rules has fostered individualism in extremis to the point that it can no longer be the ground for holding a society together?

Calvinism is one point in a process of cultural evolution. In other words, the weak kinship and strong individualism of Northwest Europeans caused them to modify Christianity after they adopted it, thus causing it to become more based on concepts like atonement, guilt, and original sin. They thus transformed Western Christianity and eventually broke away from it via the Reformation.

Protestantism helped Northwest Europeans to pursue a path of cultural evolution that took them farther and father away from kinship and closer towards new ways of organizing social relations, notably the market economy. Eventually, Protestantism moved beyond Protestantism, just as it had earlier moved beyond Western Christianity. We're living today in a kind of post-Protestantism -- a hyper-universal, hyper-individualistic outlook that has emancipated itself from its original Christian framework.

In other words, demarcate radical individualism and its modern corrolate that all “rules” are now personal choices — a radical relativism — and one has moral and social anarchy instead of an homogenous culture based on the internalization of a specific set of moral precepts.

I agree. When individualism and universalism become freed from all constraints, we get an ideology that can only be self-destructive. Almost by definition. Yet people—especially Northwest Europeans—don't see it because these values are so central not only to the current ideological environment but also to their own predispositions.

It will take a combination of calm, reasoned argument ... and "events."

In his important first chapter, to which he gives the unapologetic title “Who We Are,” Willetts explains the “deep features” that have distinguished England, and its overseas offshoots, from the rest of the world.

England has been “not just different from Papua New Guinea or Pakistan; it is also quite different from France and Italy and most of Continental Europe,” except for Holland and Denmark.

And this difference dates to at least 1250—and perhaps back to (or beyond) the Dark Age days of King Canute. [...] “Instead, think of England as being like this for at least 750 years. We live in small families. We buy and sell houses. … Our parents expect us to leave home for paid work …You try to save up some money from your wages so that you can afford to get married. … You can choose your spouse … It takes a long time to build up some savings from your work and find the right person with whom to settle down, so marriage comes quite lately, possibly in your late twenties.“

When individualism and universalism become freed from all constraints, we get an ideology that can only be self-destructive. Almost by definition

I suppose you can back to Zoroaster and Manichaeism as the antecedents of Christianity. Even protestant countries have big differences. Liberalism may be hyper individualistic in some ways but it is also a unified different tradition, with its own set of assumptions as starting points for reasoning.

The general thinking is that psychopathy/sociopathy is caused by a low level of affective empathy combined with a high level of cognitive empathy. In other words, a sociopath is someone who understands how other people feel, and understands how his actions affect other people, but who feels no grief if he hurts other people either on purpose or inadvertently.

Other more uncommon traits: fearlessness, extreme goal orientation thus behavior hardly affected by punishment. Or is that also connected to the lack of affective empathy? Is a psychopath unable to care about his own suffering?

If you show scary images to psychopaths their skin conductivity change will look quite different. Kevin Dutton from the UK has done some research on this, also wrote a popular book.

In regards to 'hysteria', there is this paper:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3323706/

"Borderline Personality Disorder as a Female Phenotypic Expression of Psychopathy?"

I looked it up after reading psychopath blogs - they claim they really like borderline women, as they are more easily persuaded to do really wild things, and are less boring due to all the rapid mood swings. Also, borderline women are very manipulative, and in many ways resemble psychopaths, but they're generally unhappy. Or at least appear to be unhappy.

Yes. This is adaptive if the psychopath’s social environment tends to under-punish transgressive behaviors, which in turn it rationally would do if the typical transgression of a typical perpetrator is more of a correctable error of individual judgement than strategic behavior.

In terms of reproductive success, the golden age for sociopaths was the period stretching from the 1920s to the late 1960s. On the one hand, parent-supervised courtship ("calling") had given way to dating, thus making young women more accessible. Seduction itself became more positively viewed in popular culture (previously, it had been considered reprehensible and even a reason for incarceration). On the other hand, adoption of unwanted babies became much more common (before the 1920s, adoption by non-relatives was very rare in North America). So "cads" made plenty of babies and found plenty of takers for them.

Since the late 1960s, "cads" have been making fewer and fewer babies. Good girls are still having sex with bad boys but are now having fewer babies with them.

Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin.

That's how we see it, but that's not how they see it. Universal morality is not the rulebook that guides most people on this planet.

There is simply no female equivalent to male “cheater” strategies that would have been effective in the long run because of the high investment women need to make in their offspring.

In some societies, notably "tropical horticulturalists," women enjoy a high degree of reproductive autonomy. A mother can provide for her needs, and for those of her children, with relatively little male assistance. In fact, assistance comes just as much from her parents and their kin. So she will try to sponge off a large number of people, and if some of them become too hostile she can move on to another person. And if they all become hostile, the consequences aren't too catastrophic. She can still get by on her own.

This is a different situation from one where the mother is primarily dependent on one person, i.e., her husband. If she loses his support, she and her children may die. The consequences can be that catastrophic. So hysteria would be counterproductive. Either her husband might leave or his ability to support her might be harmed. It's like an employer who doesn't want to work his valued employees too hard because they cannot be easily replaced.

Are historically foraging indigenous American populations devoid of psychopathic traits – like say the Inuit?

Sociopathy (or psychopathy -- the words are almost synonymous) exists in all human populations because any strategy to eliminate it will never be 100% effective. My impression is that mental illness among the Inuit tends to be self-destructive. Suicide used to be very rare but now is very common.

could there also be entire groups who have evolved sociopathic strategies to exploit the vulnerabilities of a larger group whose society they live within as a minority?

You really want me to talk about Jews, don't you? Most human cultures show favoritism toward in-group members, and it's not just the Jews. Look at the American Supreme Court. A hundred years ago, all of the justices were White Protestants. Now, none of them are. This has not come about because White Protestants, as a group, have become progressively more and more stupid and thus unable to become judges. It's because they see themselves as rugged individualists and will not act collectively to defend their interests.

Rugged individualism works marvellously when everyone practices it. Unfortunately, most people in this imperfect world play by a different rule book. And it's not just the Jews. It's most folks. The Irish were very good at collective self-defence and self-boosting in their day.

You (stupidly) fail even to understand what Frost contends.

Please, I appreciate the compliment, but insults tend to make discussion difficult.

Very low IQ is an adaptation rather than a disase, but we recognize it as disabling.

It depends on the environment you have to function in. On a worldwide basis, I suspect that IQ correlates negatively with reproductive success.

If hysteria in women is a successful reproductive strategy, and if it’s the inheritance of this suite of genes that expresses itself as sociopathy in male offspring, this raises one very ominous point. It would mean that as far as Nature is concerned, male sociopaths are simply a side effect.

I don't follow your argument. Those male offspring will have children too, and their ability to sire a lot of children could be helped along by a psychopathic personality. Again, it depends on the culture the psychopath is living in.

It might be too simplistic to say that the surplus generated by agricultural societies enabled sociopathy. Wet rice farming required a high degree of organization at the village level.

I wouldn't say "enabled." I would say "created a greater potential for." What you say about wet rice farming is correct. In that case, there was strong selection for a collectivistic mindset:

So is the real question how big and how coherent our in-group is? Modern civilization attempts to dissolve traditional small-group loyalties and make us all good citizens of the state. But is the cost that we start to regard everyone else as out-group members?

This is what's happening with many white Americans. They have long had a weak sense of kinship while organizing themselves collectively at a broader community level. Unfortunately, those collective institutions have been either taken over by the government or forced to comply with principles of "fairness." As a result, they no longer have any way to defend themselves collectively.

This is not the case with other groups. They're used to organizing collectively at the level of the family or kin group. They feel no guilt or shame over favoritism because for them it's perfectly normal.

“Tay-Sachs is probably the best known “Jewish” disease. As many as one in 25 Ashkenazi Jews is a carrier of the defective recessive gene. Today, the majority of babies born with the disease are not Jewish.

Tay-Sachs does exist in other human populations, including French Canadians curious enough. Among Ashkenazi Jews and French Canadians, it's one of several unusually common disorders that cluster within the same metabolic pathway: lysosomal storage for brain tissues. It looks like the result of strong selection for intelligence over a relatively short time frame. In that kind of fast-track situation, selection will even favor alleles that are harmful when one inherits two copies of the same allele.

We’ve all but lost the concept of evil and, in turn, have rendered society incapable of confronting evil.

The concept of "evil" is still with us. It has simply been redefined. "Racists" are defined as evil and are given the treatment that was once reserved for rapists. In terms of social acceptance, it's probably better to be a rapist than a racist.

The philosophical idealism of Christianity gives each individual the tools to freely organize themselves into productive groups irrespective of clan. Genetics is old tech. Today philosophies drive genetics.

There are different branches of Christianity. Protestantism has gone the farthest down the road of individualism and renunciation of kinship ties.

As for genetics being "old tech," I wouldn't be so sure. For the moment, genes are still in the driver's seat.

The philosophical idealism of Christianity gives each individual the tools to freely organize themselves into productive groups irrespective of clan.

There are different branches of Christianity. Protestantism has gone the farthest down the road of individualism and renunciation of kinship ties.

There are many Christian sects – but only one basic New Testament Christian philosophy – the philosophy is intellectual and idealist in nature –it says think about your worldly actions – it says do things that are hopeful and life affirming – it says go for the good – it leads to freedom. Here is that philosophy, put into world changing words.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Our forefathers were not all religious Christians – but they all were philosophical Christians.

We must not throw out the philosophical Christian baby, with the religious Christian bath water.

p.s. It is hard to put into a sentence or two – but the problem with Protestants is twofold – they have replaced the philosophical Jesus Christ with the literal bible – and they have abandoned their Christian good works to government (they have replaced voluntary good works with force)…

You’re playing a semantic game where you have no competence. Familial mental retardation is termed a “developmental disorder.”

By idiots.

You have me mistaken for someone who cares about what you think, since you beautifully demonstrate here just how much the "professionals" actually know.

since you beautifully demonstrate here just how much the “professionals” actually know.

No, that is just plain stupid. You demonstrate that you don’t understand how technical terms are used in science. You are a fundamentalist of sorts, who thinks there’s rock bottom “meaning.” Have you had any education? Nobody is informed.

Take a cue from Razib Kahn’s latest post:

“In Speciation, a book co-written by two evolutionary geneticists (that you should read!), the authors are frank that their idea about what a species is is purely instrumental. That is, what are their end goals, and what does the species concept get us?”

As with the “species” concept, so the disorder concept. Everyone seriously talking about this stuff besides you understands this.

Recall the course of this discussion. You said psychiatrists were confused about psychopathy because it is really dimensional. I pointed out that they in fact considered it dimensional. Then you said, well, if it’s dimensional, then it’s not a disorder. You’re just guessing. (You’re intellectually dishonest; you refuse to admit ignorance. You’re also militantly stupid.)

In terms of reproductive success, the golden age for sociopaths was the period stretching from the 1920s to the late 1960s. On the one hand, parent-supervised courtship ("calling") had given way to dating, thus making young women more accessible. Seduction itself became more positively viewed in popular culture (previously, it had been considered reprehensible and even a reason for incarceration). On the other hand, adoption of unwanted babies became much more common (before the 1920s, adoption by non-relatives was very rare in North America). So "cads" made plenty of babies and found plenty of takers for them.

Since the late 1960s, "cads" have been making fewer and fewer babies. Good girls are still having sex with bad boys but are now having fewer babies with them.

Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin.

That's how we see it, but that's not how they see it. Universal morality is not the rulebook that guides most people on this planet.

There is simply no female equivalent to male “cheater” strategies that would have been effective in the long run because of the high investment women need to make in their offspring.

In some societies, notably "tropical horticulturalists," women enjoy a high degree of reproductive autonomy. A mother can provide for her needs, and for those of her children, with relatively little male assistance. In fact, assistance comes just as much from her parents and their kin. So she will try to sponge off a large number of people, and if some of them become too hostile she can move on to another person. And if they all become hostile, the consequences aren't too catastrophic. She can still get by on her own.

This is a different situation from one where the mother is primarily dependent on one person, i.e., her husband. If she loses his support, she and her children may die. The consequences can be that catastrophic. So hysteria would be counterproductive. Either her husband might leave or his ability to support her might be harmed. It's like an employer who doesn't want to work his valued employees too hard because they cannot be easily replaced.

Are historically foraging indigenous American populations devoid of psychopathic traits – like say the Inuit?

Sociopathy (or psychopathy -- the words are almost synonymous) exists in all human populations because any strategy to eliminate it will never be 100% effective. My impression is that mental illness among the Inuit tends to be self-destructive. Suicide used to be very rare but now is very common.

could there also be entire groups who have evolved sociopathic strategies to exploit the vulnerabilities of a larger group whose society they live within as a minority?

You really want me to talk about Jews, don't you? Most human cultures show favoritism toward in-group members, and it's not just the Jews. Look at the American Supreme Court. A hundred years ago, all of the justices were White Protestants. Now, none of them are. This has not come about because White Protestants, as a group, have become progressively more and more stupid and thus unable to become judges. It's because they see themselves as rugged individualists and will not act collectively to defend their interests.

Rugged individualism works marvellously when everyone practices it. Unfortunately, most people in this imperfect world play by a different rule book. And it's not just the Jews. It's most folks. The Irish were very good at collective self-defence and self-boosting in their day.

You (stupidly) fail even to understand what Frost contends.

Please, I appreciate the compliment, but insults tend to make discussion difficult.

Very low IQ is an adaptation rather than a disase, but we recognize it as disabling.

It depends on the environment you have to function in. On a worldwide basis, I suspect that IQ correlates negatively with reproductive success.

If hysteria in women is a successful reproductive strategy, and if it’s the inheritance of this suite of genes that expresses itself as sociopathy in male offspring, this raises one very ominous point. It would mean that as far as Nature is concerned, male sociopaths are simply a side effect.

I don't follow your argument. Those male offspring will have children too, and their ability to sire a lot of children could be helped along by a psychopathic personality. Again, it depends on the culture the psychopath is living in.

It might be too simplistic to say that the surplus generated by agricultural societies enabled sociopathy. Wet rice farming required a high degree of organization at the village level.

I wouldn't say "enabled." I would say "created a greater potential for." What you say about wet rice farming is correct. In that case, there was strong selection for a collectivistic mindset:

So is the real question how big and how coherent our in-group is? Modern civilization attempts to dissolve traditional small-group loyalties and make us all good citizens of the state. But is the cost that we start to regard everyone else as out-group members?

This is what's happening with many white Americans. They have long had a weak sense of kinship while organizing themselves collectively at a broader community level. Unfortunately, those collective institutions have been either taken over by the government or forced to comply with principles of "fairness." As a result, they no longer have any way to defend themselves collectively.

This is not the case with other groups. They're used to organizing collectively at the level of the family or kin group. They feel no guilt or shame over favoritism because for them it's perfectly normal.

“Tay-Sachs is probably the best known “Jewish” disease. As many as one in 25 Ashkenazi Jews is a carrier of the defective recessive gene. Today, the majority of babies born with the disease are not Jewish.

Tay-Sachs does exist in other human populations, including French Canadians curious enough. Among Ashkenazi Jews and French Canadians, it's one of several unusually common disorders that cluster within the same metabolic pathway: lysosomal storage for brain tissues. It looks like the result of strong selection for intelligence over a relatively short time frame. In that kind of fast-track situation, selection will even favor alleles that are harmful when one inherits two copies of the same allele.

We’ve all but lost the concept of evil and, in turn, have rendered society incapable of confronting evil.

The concept of "evil" is still with us. It has simply been redefined. "Racists" are defined as evil and are given the treatment that was once reserved for rapists. In terms of social acceptance, it's probably better to be a rapist than a racist.

The philosophical idealism of Christianity gives each individual the tools to freely organize themselves into productive groups irrespective of clan. Genetics is old tech. Today philosophies drive genetics.

There are different branches of Christianity. Protestantism has gone the farthest down the road of individualism and renunciation of kinship ties.

As for genetics being "old tech," I wouldn't be so sure. For the moment, genes are still in the driver's seat.

Please, I appreciate the compliment, but insults tend to make discussion difficult.

I’m not into turning the other cheek. When Jayman uses the term “idiot” for opponents, I feel free to call his comments (not him) stupid. Just because the supposed “idiot” isn’t in the discussion is beside the point of the rudeness involved.

Very low IQ is an adaptation rather than a disase, but we recognize it as disabling.

It depends on the environment you have to function in. On a worldwide basis, I suspect that IQ correlates negatively with reproductive success.

Perhaps my conceptualization is wrong, but I would think familial low IQ is an adaptation even if it limits reproductive success. I take the criterion to be whether it is produced by selection, not whether it facilitates reproduction. I’m open to correction. (It is produced by selection even if it is in itself negative – if that even has meaning. For example, low intelligence affords a smaller brain with fewer metabolic demands.)

Critics grumbled about the three S’s: that he married a shiksa on Shabbes and served shrimp—a pained judgment on his second wedding to the tall, blonde, well-bred WASP Nancy Maginnes. Kissinger fueled perceptions of self-hatred by rudely ignoring old friends who called him “Heinz” or tried to “bagel” him—today’s shorthand for the Jewish tendency when out in public to connect, subtly or otherwise, with a fellow member of the tribe. But, as befits an intellectual swashbuckler who coined memorable phrases such as “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” Kissinger distanced himself from his Jewish roots with damning wisecracks. “If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be anti-Semitic,” he once quipped, and “any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.” Another time, he told a friend, “I was born Jewish, but the truth is that has no significance for me. … America has given me everything.”

Henry Kissinger’s quote, “Any people who have been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong”.

Can you provide the source for this quote?

Don't insist too much on this topic. Mr. Frost doesn't have much patience with this kind of comments.

However, there's some truth in your comment.

“…Don’t insist too much on this topic. Mr. Frost doesn’t have much patience with this kind of comments…”

It is rude but the fact remains that the idea “The Jews are a tribe of psychopaths” has enormous explanatory power. Maybe it’s wrong but using this one idea to explain certain aspects of the World you will never be surprised and many things that are completely baffling become simple and intuitive. The whole point of blogs such as these are ultimately to make sense of the World and navigate within the World.

The past has shown that psychopaths can destroy whole countries. It only takes a few psychopaths to destroy a country. A prime example, who is not a Jew, is Alcibiades. Alcibiades went from city to city in the ancient world. In Sparta he was more Spartan than the Spartans. Changing his chameleon skin every time he moved somewhere else and betraying everyone he came in contact with. Alcibiades killed Athens with risky schemes to glorify himself.

“…He had, as they say, one power which transcended all others, and proved an implement of his chase for men: that of assimilating and adapting himself to the pursuits and lives of others, thereby assuming more violent changes than the chameleon. That animal, however, as it is said, is utterly unable to assume one colour, namely, white; but Alcibiades could associate with good and bad alike, and found naught that he could not imitate and practice. 5 In Sparta, he was all for bodily training, simplicity of life, and severity of countenance; in Ionia, for p65 luxurious ease and pleasure; in Thrace, for drinking deep; in Thessaly, for riding hard; and when he was thrown with Tissaphernes the satrap, he outdid even Persian magnificence in his pomp and lavishness. It was not that he could so easily pass entirely from one manner of man to another, nor that he actually underwent in every case a change in his real character; but when he saw that his natural manners were likely to be annoying to his associates, he was quick to assume any counterfeit exterior which might in each case be suitable for them…”

Definite psychopath. Alcibiades was responsible for talking the Athenians into attacking Syracuse. Syracuse was directly responsible for the end of Athens as a power.

Psychopaths can do the most ridiculous things. There’s an excellent book by Hervey Cleckley “The Mask of Sanity”. Read this one small chapter about a Spath called Stanley.

In terms of reproductive success, the golden age for sociopaths was the period stretching from the 1920s to the late 1960s. On the one hand, parent-supervised courtship ("calling") had given way to dating, thus making young women more accessible. Seduction itself became more positively viewed in popular culture (previously, it had been considered reprehensible and even a reason for incarceration). On the other hand, adoption of unwanted babies became much more common (before the 1920s, adoption by non-relatives was very rare in North America). So "cads" made plenty of babies and found plenty of takers for them.

Since the late 1960s, "cads" have been making fewer and fewer babies. Good girls are still having sex with bad boys but are now having fewer babies with them.

Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin.

That's how we see it, but that's not how they see it. Universal morality is not the rulebook that guides most people on this planet.

There is simply no female equivalent to male “cheater” strategies that would have been effective in the long run because of the high investment women need to make in their offspring.

In some societies, notably "tropical horticulturalists," women enjoy a high degree of reproductive autonomy. A mother can provide for her needs, and for those of her children, with relatively little male assistance. In fact, assistance comes just as much from her parents and their kin. So she will try to sponge off a large number of people, and if some of them become too hostile she can move on to another person. And if they all become hostile, the consequences aren't too catastrophic. She can still get by on her own.

This is a different situation from one where the mother is primarily dependent on one person, i.e., her husband. If she loses his support, she and her children may die. The consequences can be that catastrophic. So hysteria would be counterproductive. Either her husband might leave or his ability to support her might be harmed. It's like an employer who doesn't want to work his valued employees too hard because they cannot be easily replaced.

Are historically foraging indigenous American populations devoid of psychopathic traits – like say the Inuit?

Sociopathy (or psychopathy -- the words are almost synonymous) exists in all human populations because any strategy to eliminate it will never be 100% effective. My impression is that mental illness among the Inuit tends to be self-destructive. Suicide used to be very rare but now is very common.

could there also be entire groups who have evolved sociopathic strategies to exploit the vulnerabilities of a larger group whose society they live within as a minority?

You really want me to talk about Jews, don't you? Most human cultures show favoritism toward in-group members, and it's not just the Jews. Look at the American Supreme Court. A hundred years ago, all of the justices were White Protestants. Now, none of them are. This has not come about because White Protestants, as a group, have become progressively more and more stupid and thus unable to become judges. It's because they see themselves as rugged individualists and will not act collectively to defend their interests.

Rugged individualism works marvellously when everyone practices it. Unfortunately, most people in this imperfect world play by a different rule book. And it's not just the Jews. It's most folks. The Irish were very good at collective self-defence and self-boosting in their day.

You (stupidly) fail even to understand what Frost contends.

Please, I appreciate the compliment, but insults tend to make discussion difficult.

Very low IQ is an adaptation rather than a disase, but we recognize it as disabling.

It depends on the environment you have to function in. On a worldwide basis, I suspect that IQ correlates negatively with reproductive success.

If hysteria in women is a successful reproductive strategy, and if it’s the inheritance of this suite of genes that expresses itself as sociopathy in male offspring, this raises one very ominous point. It would mean that as far as Nature is concerned, male sociopaths are simply a side effect.

I don't follow your argument. Those male offspring will have children too, and their ability to sire a lot of children could be helped along by a psychopathic personality. Again, it depends on the culture the psychopath is living in.

It might be too simplistic to say that the surplus generated by agricultural societies enabled sociopathy. Wet rice farming required a high degree of organization at the village level.

I wouldn't say "enabled." I would say "created a greater potential for." What you say about wet rice farming is correct. In that case, there was strong selection for a collectivistic mindset:

So is the real question how big and how coherent our in-group is? Modern civilization attempts to dissolve traditional small-group loyalties and make us all good citizens of the state. But is the cost that we start to regard everyone else as out-group members?

This is what's happening with many white Americans. They have long had a weak sense of kinship while organizing themselves collectively at a broader community level. Unfortunately, those collective institutions have been either taken over by the government or forced to comply with principles of "fairness." As a result, they no longer have any way to defend themselves collectively.

This is not the case with other groups. They're used to organizing collectively at the level of the family or kin group. They feel no guilt or shame over favoritism because for them it's perfectly normal.

“Tay-Sachs is probably the best known “Jewish” disease. As many as one in 25 Ashkenazi Jews is a carrier of the defective recessive gene. Today, the majority of babies born with the disease are not Jewish.

Tay-Sachs does exist in other human populations, including French Canadians curious enough. Among Ashkenazi Jews and French Canadians, it's one of several unusually common disorders that cluster within the same metabolic pathway: lysosomal storage for brain tissues. It looks like the result of strong selection for intelligence over a relatively short time frame. In that kind of fast-track situation, selection will even favor alleles that are harmful when one inherits two copies of the same allele.

We’ve all but lost the concept of evil and, in turn, have rendered society incapable of confronting evil.

The concept of "evil" is still with us. It has simply been redefined. "Racists" are defined as evil and are given the treatment that was once reserved for rapists. In terms of social acceptance, it's probably better to be a rapist than a racist.

The philosophical idealism of Christianity gives each individual the tools to freely organize themselves into productive groups irrespective of clan. Genetics is old tech. Today philosophies drive genetics.

There are different branches of Christianity. Protestantism has gone the farthest down the road of individualism and renunciation of kinship ties.

As for genetics being "old tech," I wouldn't be so sure. For the moment, genes are still in the driver's seat.

Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin.

That’s how we see it, but that’s not how they see it. Universal morality is not the rulebook that guides most people on this planet.

I completely agree. But I think the similarity is telling. What we call “psychopathy” is just perhaps individuals (at least Western society) than has a much higher than average of these exploitative traits – traits which are common in clannish societies. They are one and the same, I am saying.

There is simply no female equivalent to male “cheater” strategies that would have been effective in the long run because of the high investment women need to make in their offspring.

In some societies, notably “tropical horticulturalists,” women enjoy a high degree of reproductive autonomy. A mother can provide for her needs, and for those of her children, with relatively little male assistance. In fact, assistance comes just as much from her parents and their kin. So she will try to sponge off a large number of people, and if some of them become too hostile she can move on to another person. And if they all become hostile, the consequences aren’t too catastrophic. She can still get by on her own.

I can see that. Female cheater strategies would be a complete bust almost anywhere else.

Please, I appreciate the compliment, but insults tend to make discussion difficult.

I'm not into turning the other cheek. When Jayman uses the term "idiot" for opponents, I feel free to call his comments (not him) stupid. Just because the supposed "idiot" isn't in the discussion is beside the point of the rudeness involved.

Very low IQ is an adaptation rather than a disase, but we recognize it as disabling.

It depends on the environment you have to function in. On a worldwide basis, I suspect that IQ correlates negatively with reproductive success.

Perhaps my conceptualization is wrong, but I would think familial low IQ is an adaptation even if it limits reproductive success. I take the criterion to be whether it is produced by selection, not whether it facilitates reproduction. I'm open to correction. (It is produced by selection even if it is in itself negative - if that even has meaning. For example, low intelligence affords a smaller brain with fewer metabolic demands.)

I feel free to call his comments (not him) stupid

You’re also militantly stupid.

I may be stupid as well, but I can’t see the distinction that you are trying to make here.

A person who is militantly stupid is made stupid by "convictions.' It isn't (quite) like saying "you're a stupid person." I do think the distinction is weak, and I should not have totally sworn off calling Jayman stupid. [I mean, someone has to say it somewhere, since it censors it on his blog while calling others stupid.]

Jayman's ignorant alpha male behavior irritates many others. And his intellectual dishonesty. Why it is tolerated a contrarian site eludes me. Commenters have a social duty to put him - on occasion - in his place.

Here's a little hypothetical prediction: If we developed a perfect brain scan test for psychopathy and subjected CEOs and politicians and other "elites" to it, we'd identify many of the gentiles and few of the jews as psychopaths.

Maybe it helps to think of Bernie Madoff. He may be a psychopath. He scammed fellow Jews. Most Jews don't do that... because they're not psychopaths.

“… If we developed a perfect brain scan test for psychopathy and subjected CEOs and politicians and other “elites” to it, we’d identify many of the gentiles and few of the jews as psychopaths…”

You of course take a specific limited population of Gentiles and compare it to all Jews. Your comparison is dishonest. Typical of the sneaky lying way that counts for “information” in our debased country. Percentage wise the Jews would be off the charts compared to Gentiles, OF THE GENERAL POPULATION.

You of course take a specific limited population of Gentiles and compare it to all Jews.

Nope, we'd compare jews and gentiles within the specific population of "CEOs and politicians and other 'elites'". We don't care about psychopathic bagel bakers or mohels, right? We care about psychopaths in positions of power over us. I know we won't be able to actually perform this test, but I very strongly suspect we'd find jews in power to be less psychopathic than gentiles in power.

Please, I appreciate the compliment, but insults tend to make discussion difficult.

I'm not into turning the other cheek. When Jayman uses the term "idiot" for opponents, I feel free to call his comments (not him) stupid. Just because the supposed "idiot" isn't in the discussion is beside the point of the rudeness involved.

Very low IQ is an adaptation rather than a disase, but we recognize it as disabling.

It depends on the environment you have to function in. On a worldwide basis, I suspect that IQ correlates negatively with reproductive success.

Perhaps my conceptualization is wrong, but I would think familial low IQ is an adaptation even if it limits reproductive success. I take the criterion to be whether it is produced by selection, not whether it facilitates reproduction. I'm open to correction. (It is produced by selection even if it is in itself negative - if that even has meaning. For example, low intelligence affords a smaller brain with fewer metabolic demands.)

Perhaps my conceptualization is wrong, but I would think familial low IQ is an adaptation even if it limits reproductive success.

I didn’t. There are, or have been, civilizations with features more depraved than ours. That exonerates nobody.

If all civilizations are “depraved,” that word no longer has any useful meaning. Perhaps you’re setting the bar too high.

You don’t see how a patriarchal warrior culture might select for altruism, which later on might be expressed in various ways in large societies?

How would the expansion of the Indo-Europeans within Europe account for the Hajnal line? Their homeland is believed to have been either the area north of the Black Sea or Anatolia. In either case, their genetic impact would have decreased farther north and west from that point of origin.

That pattern is the opposite of the one I’m trying to explain, i.e., a complex of behavioral predispositions that seems centered on the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic and that weakens progressively as one goes farther south and east.

alcoholism kills the superego (or if you prefer, the conscience) which I suppose is one way of saying it causes sociopathy.

The arrow of causality probably runs in the other direction. Sociopaths are likely to become alcoholics because they are impulsive and focused on the present. Not all sociopaths are alcoholics. I know a few who seldom drink.

Serial killers with a lot of children would be evidence for being not sick but selfish from a genetic point of view.

Since the late 1960s, sociopaths have actually had fewer children on average than non-sociopaths. This is largely because more women are practicing birth control when they have sex with them.

the problem with Protestants is twofold – they have replaced the philosophical Jesus Christ with the literal bible – and they have abandoned their Christian good works to government (they have replaced voluntary good works with force)…

Protestants are still performing a lot of good works without government assistance, but those good works are often poorly thought out. It’s like the nice lady who takes in one stray cat after another. She’s engaging in a kind of moral masturbation that does more harm than good.

We must not throw out the philosophical Christian baby, with the religious Christian bath water.

I know a lot of non-religious philosophical Christians. In some ways, they’re worse than the fundamentalists. If you emancipate Christianity from the limitations of religion, you’re opening a Pandora’s Box whose consequences are not entirely positive.

I’m not into turning the other cheek. When Jayman uses the term “idiot” for opponents, I feel free to call his comments (not him) stupid.

I didn’t notice the “idiot” comment, so I should condemn that one as well. Please, we’re supposed to be adults here. It takes two to make an argument, and if one person persists in being abusive it’s best to ignore him. I’d like to delete such comments but I can’t.

I would think familial low IQ is an adaptation even if it limits reproductive success. I take the criterion to be whether it is produced by selection, not whether it facilitates reproduction.

I’m not sure if I follow you. If a trait limits reproductive success, it will gradually disappear from the gene pool. I agree that high IQ is very demanding metabolically, so if you don’t need it, it will be selected out of the gene pool.

Peter, We don’t hear much about female hysteria anymore, but we do hear about something called borderline personality disorder. Are they the same thing?

The term “hysteria” has fallen into disfavor. The wiki page says:

Generally, modern medical professionals have given up the use of “hysteria” as a diagnostic category, replacing it with more precisely defined categories such as somatization disorder. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association officially changed the diagnosis of “hysterical neurosis, conversion type” , the most dangerous and effective type, to “conversion disorder”.

Borderline personality disorder seems to be a larger category that includes hysteria:

Current psychiatric terminology distinguishes two types of disorder that were previously labelled ‘hysteria’: somatoform and dissociative. There are many rare cases of this disorder in the present when nothing else can be diagnosed to the patients. The dissociative disorders in DSM-IV-TR include dissociative amnesia, dissociative fugue, dissociative identity disorder, depersonalization disorder, and dissociative disorder not otherwise specified. Somatoform disorders include conversion disorder, somatization disorder, pain disorder, hypochondriasis, and body dysmorphic disorder. In somatoform disorders, the patient exhibits physical symptoms such as low back pain or limb paralysis, without apparent physical cause. Additionally, certain culture-bound syndromes such as “ataques de nervios” (“attacks of nerves”) identified in Hispanic populations, and popularized by the Almodóvar film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, exemplify psychiatric phenomena that encompass both somatoform and dissociative symptoms and that have been linked to psychological trauma.[7] Recent neuroscientific research, however, is starting to show that there are characteristic patterns of brain activity associated with these states.[8] All these disorders are thought to be unconscious, not feigned or intentional malingering.

How would the expansion of the Indo-Europeans within Europe account for the Hajnal line? Their homeland is believed to have been either the area north of the Black Sea or Anatolia. In either case, their genetic impact would have decreased farther north and west from that point of origin.

That pattern is the opposite of the one I’m trying to explain, i.e., a complex of behavioral predispositions that seems centered on the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic and that weakens progressively as one goes farther south and east.

The Indo-Europeans were mobile, and much of the Black Sea region and Anatolia no longer speak IE languages. Much of the area speak Caucasian and Turkic languages. IE languages are more dominant in Europe. It's not clear at all that their impact would have decreased linearly farther north and west, and many argue the opposite.

As Hamilton writes, we know how altruism can be selected by patriarchal warrior cultures and isn't in large communities, so the IEs seem to be a much more plausible source than the large communities you posit.

We must not throw out the philosophical Christian baby, with the religious Christian bath water.

I know a lot of non-religious philosophical Christians. In some ways, they’re worse than the fundamentalists. If you emancipate Christianity from the limitations of religion, you’re opening a Pandora’s Box whose consequences are not entirely positive.

I like the word emancipate. Clearly religious Christianity is shackled by the Old Testament. Martin Luther did Christianity a great service and a great disservice. He liberate Christianity from the dictates of the priesthood. But then he shackled Christianity to the Old Testament bible. He replaced the authority of the priesthood with the authority of the bible.

Religions have two parts to them, they tell us how to relate to God, and they tell us how to relate to each other (i.e., they give us a philosophy for living) . The gods found in the OT and the NT are very different. For simplicity sake let us say God 1.0 and God 2.0. God 1.0 is mean, tribal, and unforgiving, and God 2.0 is hopeful, universal , and forgiving. Jesus gave us God 2.0, Luther took us back to God 1.0

Clearly the philosophies that follow these different gods are dissimilar . The idealistic Christian philosophy that flows from God 2.0 says be hopeful, protect life, love your neighbor as you love yourself, seek truth, and forgive --- these ideals lead us to producing personal freedom and association. How can we fear that?

"... If we developed a perfect brain scan test for psychopathy and subjected CEOs and politicians and other “elites” to it, we’d identify many of the gentiles and few of the jews as psychopaths..."

You of course take a specific limited population of Gentiles and compare it to all Jews. Your comparison is dishonest. Typical of the sneaky lying way that counts for "information" in our debased country. Percentage wise the Jews would be off the charts compared to Gentiles, OF THE GENERAL POPULATION.

You of course take a specific limited population of Gentiles and compare it to all Jews.

Nope, we’d compare jews and gentiles within the specific population of “CEOs and politicians and other ‘elites’”. We don’t care about psychopathic bagel bakers or mohels, right? We care about psychopaths in positions of power over us. I know we won’t be able to actually perform this test, but I very strongly suspect we’d find jews in power to be less psychopathic than gentiles in power.

Doggerland refugees might have had something to do with the origin of coastal communities especially where the last land bridges were (England and Denmark). Denmark is the most co-operative society in the world.
—-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histrionic_personality_disorder HPD affects four times as many women as men.[1] It has a prevalence of 2–3% in the general population and 10–15% in inpatient and outpatient mental health institutions.[2]
HPD lies in the dramatic cluster of personality disorders.[3] People with HPD have a high need for attention, make loud and inappropriate appearances, exaggerate their behaviors and emotions, and crave stimulation.[3] They may exhibit sexually provocative behavior, express strong emotions with an impressionistic style, and can be easily influenced by others. Associated features include egocentrism, self-indulgence, continuous longing for appreciation, and persistent manipulative behavior to achieve their own needs.

Between 1938 and 2007 the [MMPI psychopathology] clinical scores of college students rose steadily, especially in moodiness, restlessness, dissatisfaction, and instability.

Sociopathy is therefore not an illness but a strategy. It has been least successful in small societies where both sexes invest heavily in care for their partners and offspring. It has been more successful in larger societies, particularly those where men invest less in partners and offspring. Indeed, because sociopathy does so well in such contexts, it may have hindered the development of larger and more complex societies.

http://jeremynicholl.photoshelter.com/image/I0000HsPys3A9Ve0 The Chechen republic has a population of only 1,268,989, and is as different to Denmark as can be. Denmark, which surrendered in 2 hours to Nazi Germany, has the highest (least masculine) digit ratio in the world, and a very distinctive cooperative politics, so on a variety of reliable indices it is the least sociopathic country in the world. Some time ago a Danish couple were arrested in NYC after leaving their child in a pram outside a restaurant, a common practice in their home country

Doggerland refugees might have had something to do with the origin of coastal communities especially where the last land bridges were (England and Denmark). Denmark is the most co-operative society in the world.
----

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histrionic_personality_disorder HPD affects four times as many women as men.[1] It has a prevalence of 2–3% in the general population and 10–15% in inpatient and outpatient mental health institutions.[2]
HPD lies in the dramatic cluster of personality disorders.[3] People with HPD have a high need for attention, make loud and inappropriate appearances, exaggerate their behaviors and emotions, and crave stimulation.[3] They may exhibit sexually provocative behavior, express strong emotions with an impressionistic style, and can be easily influenced by others. Associated features include egocentrism, self-indulgence, continuous longing for appreciation, and persistent manipulative behavior to achieve their own needs.

Between 1938 and 2007 the [MMPI psychopathology] clinical scores of college students rose steadily, especially in moodiness, restlessness, dissatisfaction, and instability.

Denmark has a population of 5 and a half million, smaller than many cities.

Second, the Western concept of psychopathy is based on one type of individual with a paticular configuration of traits. When you examine that one type, and assume that type exists in isolation, then it sure does seem like an odd feature that needs explanation.

But in reality, as you pointed out in your earlier post, psychopathic traits exist on a continuum. That is, the Dark Triad (Tetrad). Psychopathy is continuously distributed in the population just like other personality traits. Its selection is hence similar in nature to selection for all the other dimensions of personality.

As well, as I argue in my post above, psychopathic traits vary across populations. Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin. The "loner" psychopath (as opposed to one bound to kin) as described in this peice is probably more a Western phenomenon.

I have to disagree with Harpending and Sobus on one thing: this type of psychopathy would never have been adaptive in women. There is simply no female equivalent to male "cheater" strategies that would have been effective in the long run because of the high investment women need to make in their offspring. This too is a consequence of looking at things through a NW European lens.

In reality, the existence of psychopathic traits in women (beyond the normal distrubution of personality or more clannish traits) is probably a result of sexual antagonistic selection, if anything. Indeed, many masculine features in women are the result of such, I suspect:

Sociopathy doesn't look like a mental illness, being much less incapacitating than schizophrenia and most mental disorders. A sociopath can deal with other people well enough, perhaps too well.

In any case, I will discuss this in a future post on features and bugs in human psychology. Psychopathy is clearly an evolved trait, the result of selection – a feature – working as it should. By contrast, autism, schizophrenia, and the like are bugs; they are the result of something that is "broken" and are always being selected against.

Obligate male sexuality is also very much a bug: it is a mental illness that's always detrimental to fitness. Yet the DSM regards psychopathy as a disorder and homosexuality as not a disorder – brilliant... :\

In a small band of hunter-gatherers, a sociopath will not last long because he is always interacting with the same small group of people

I wonder about that. Are historically foraging indigenous American populations devoid of psychopathic traits – like say the Inuit?

As well, as I argue in my post above, psychopathic traits vary across populations. Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin. The “loner” psychopath (as opposed to one bound to kin) as described in this peice is probably more a Western phenomenon.

JayMan,

How would you define psychopathy and clannishness here? Would you regard someone who discriminates against you as being psychopathic and or clannish?

Would you regard someone who discriminates against you as being psychopathic and or clannish?

To discriminate without selfish reasons I think you have to put your group first, something that sociopathic personalities are not going to do.

If clannishness means anything genetic it would suggest favouring distant relatives over all others against self interest and hence in a type of group selection. There is little evidence for that outliving the need for it . Scottish clans, despite their relatedness, were quickly dissolved by introduction of a commercial system of landholding. Organisation is for group competition is not just individual strategy writ large, for example, a sociopathic personality would try to evade onerous duty to relatives, but elicit support from them in a parasitical way.

[..] Ludwig also did an analysis of biographies of individuals that had been reviewed in The New York Times Book Review between 1960 and 1990 and found much the same, along with the fact that 18% of poets included had committed suicide. Compared to people in other professions, the rate of forced psychiatric hospitalization of artists, writers, and composers was 6 to 7 times higher. Nor is this effect limited to successful, established writers: of 30 people attending the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 80% reported a mood disorder (compared to 30% in a control group), and half of those had a manic-depressive illness (four times the rate of the controls). [...]

If autistic tendencies have contributed to mathematics, science, and technology, mentalistic ones have also clearly done so were literature, art, religion, politics, and society are concerned. Indeed, to the extent that there is an important cultural dimension to mentalism reflected in social conventions and political, religious, and ethnic beliefs, values, and ideals, mentalistic savantism has clearly played a major role in history. And just as many major contributors to human scientific and technological culture have been diagnosed as autistic savants, so you could imagine that a large number of literary, artistic, religious, and political luminaries might be their hyper-mentalistic equivalents—as many poets evidently were.

One could generalise and say the West had all the science and technology while the East had superiority in interpersonal manipulation.

As well, as I argue in my post above, psychopathic traits vary across populations. Most clannish populations act in ways Westerners would consider psychopathic towards outgroups and other non-kin. The “loner” psychopath (as opposed to one bound to kin) as described in this peice is probably more a Western phenomenon.

JayMan,

How would you define psychopathy and clannishness here? Would you regard someone who discriminates against you as being psychopathic and or clannish?

Would you regard someone who discriminates against you as being psychopathic and or clannish?

To discriminate without selfish reasons I think you have to put your group first, something that sociopathic personalities are not going to do.

If clannishness means anything genetic it would suggest favouring distant relatives over all others against self interest and hence in a type of group selection. There is little evidence for that outliving the need for it . Scottish clans, despite their relatedness, were quickly dissolved by introduction of a commercial system of landholding. Organisation is for group competition is not just individual strategy writ large, for example, a sociopathic personality would try to evade onerous duty to relatives, but elicit support from them in a parasitical way.

Before speculating about possible reasons or mechanisms, I'm trying to see what sort of behavioral phenotypes JayMan and others might have in mind. Would JayMan regard discrimination against him as psychopathic and or clannish?

We are living in ‘sick’ times, but sickness also means crisis, and crisis means new possibilities.

Thus far, alternative right has been a political, ideological, intellectual, and cultural movement. There are Christian Alt-Rightists and some neo-pagan Alt-Rightists who look to Odin and stuff. Also, some Alt-Rightists say they are ‘spiritual’ in a ‘meta’ way. They don’t believe in spirits in the literal sense but they have a ‘spiritual’ or sacred sense of connection to their identity, history, and beauty.

But could Alt Right spawn a genuine religious movement based on new prophecy and vision?

Isn’t our time ripe for the birth of a new religion?

Think of how Christianity and Islam arose.

Both arose during times of crisis of faith and uncertainty of power.

In the time of Jesus, the Jews were an occupied people. Their God wasn’t doing much for them. The Romans were kicking butt. The Jewish elites became collaborators with the Roman occupiers. A lot of Jews lost respect for Jewish elites and elders. They began to question their faith.
As for the various tribes that were non-Jewish and non-Roman, there was also a crisis of faith. Each tribe or ethnic community had its own god(s), but it was difficult to worship such gods when they were obvious inferior to the Roman gods. After all, if their gods were so powerful, how come they couldn’t protect the people from the Romans who worshiped different gods? Even as Romans tolerated and allowed non-Romans to keep and worship their own gods, the non-Romans were bound to suffer from a crisis of faith because their gods were useless in defending the community from the Romans who worshiped gods like Jupiter and Apollo.

But there was a crisis of faith among the Romans. Around the time of Jesus was the writer Ovid. His work METAMORPHOSIS mocked the Greco-Roman mythology. It was all satire of the gods, a joke. And people read it for fun. So, the Romans had stopped taking their myths and religions seriously. It had become just a matter of empty rituals and rites, of pageantry. It’s like Christmas means nothing to Americans but an opportunity to indulge in consumerism and go to the opening of a Tarantino movie like DJANGO UNCHAINED or HATEFUL EIGHT.

So, Jews were feeling the heat of spiritual crisis. The many pagan folks lost confidence in their own gods. And Romans, the rulers of a great empire, no longer believed in their gods.

So, figures like Jesus and St. Paul could make a difference in this world of spiritual crisis or vacuity.
They offered a new vision of the Jewish God for all mankind. And there was some fusion of Judaic and pagan elements/themes in this new faith. In time, this faith would engulf the Roman Empire and much of the pagan Near East. Paul was a genius as visionary, intellectual, writer, preacher, promoter, and marketer.

And consider the rise of Islam. During the time of Muhammad. the two great empires of Southern Europe and Near East had grown big, moribund, and exhausted, not least by battling each other to a draw time and time again. The Byzantine Empire became overly stuffy and conservative. And Zoroastrianism of the Persians no longer had the pull it once did. Byzantine Christianity had become dull bureaucratic stuff of old bearded men. Zoroastrianism had decayed into empty ritualism and monumentalism.

Between these two tired and decaying mega-civilizations that lost vigor and were incapable of new visions, a man named Muhammad arose with a new spiritual vision. He borrowed heavily from Judaism and Christianity, but he blended those ideas with Arab pagan culture and his own visions. And he changed the world. Islam was a tree that grew from the cracks between two rocks.

Now, look at our world. It is a spiritual wasteland. Christianity is in a sorry state(with the possible exception in Russia, but even in Russia, it stands for staid conservatism, not anything vital and vigorous). Christianity in EU is dead. In the UK, churches have been taken over by homos. In the US, mainline churches belong to lesbians, and Evangelicals are mostly morons who drool saliva while muttering, ‘uh duh, we stand with Israel, we stand with Israel’. Some Evangelicals are even sucking up to homos.
Black church is just a wildass disco with Negroes rapping, tapping, and shaking ass.

Marxism, the great secular faith of the 20th century, is gone for good. This thing called ‘cultural marxism’ is a just a jumble of contradictions.

There are neo-faiths like homomania, MLK cult, worship of slut feminism or whoreship, cult of celebrity, Oprah-mania, Obama-mania, Jew-worship, and other silliness, but they are all junk.

Some might say Islam is still a strong faith, and it is bound to have greater longevity than all the fashion-cults of today that will pass away as fads. I mean who’s gonna care that America in 2015 was supposed to worship Bruce Jenner as Caitlyn?

While Islam is made of stronger stuff than the fashion-cults of today, it offers nothing new or interesting. It’s just a lot of Aloha Akbar, men with beards and dull dress, women with veils, ISIS acting psycho, Iranian clergy wearing silly hats, and hating on dogs and prohibiting alcohol. One good thing about Islam is the banning of pork as pigs shouldn’t be killed. They are smart and wonderful animals. To be sure, Muslims don’t eat pork cuz they say the pig is dirty and filthy, but still, any excuse not to eat pigs is better than eating pigs.

Anyway, given the total spiritual wasteland of our times and the crisis of faith afflicting the world — can anyone take the Pope seriously, especially when so many Catholics wait with abated breath with the hope that he will bless ‘gay marriage’? — , isn’t this an ideal time for a man of vision to play the new prophet who founds a new religion?

If indeed there is a supreme god or deity, then he must be willing to speak to anyone with an ear. So, someone who speaks to this god and hears the new truth could found a new faith.

And one could go for monism than monotheism. Monotheism says there is only one God whereas monism says there is one source of all the gods, but there can be many manifestations of this god.

Thus, this new vision could blend the idea of one supreme being with various pagan gods. Indeed, each people/race could be said to have their set of gods who are local representatives of the one supreme god who rules over all. This way, one can have universalism and particularism.

The Bubblegum faith offers a glimpse into how this may be possible(note: avoid the dubbed version of Bubblegum Crisis. It sucks. Seek out the original with subtitles):

Would you regard someone who discriminates against you as being psychopathic and or clannish?

To discriminate without selfish reasons I think you have to put your group first, something that sociopathic personalities are not going to do.

If clannishness means anything genetic it would suggest favouring distant relatives over all others against self interest and hence in a type of group selection. There is little evidence for that outliving the need for it . Scottish clans, despite their relatedness, were quickly dissolved by introduction of a commercial system of landholding. Organisation is for group competition is not just individual strategy writ large, for example, a sociopathic personality would try to evade onerous duty to relatives, but elicit support from them in a parasitical way.

Before speculating about possible reasons or mechanisms, I’m trying to see what sort of behavioral phenotypes JayMan and others might have in mind. Would JayMan regard discrimination against him as psychopathic and or clannish?

Doggerland refugees might have had something to do with the origin of coastal communities especially where the last land bridges were (England and Denmark). Denmark is the most co-operative society in the world.
----

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histrionic_personality_disorder HPD affects four times as many women as men.[1] It has a prevalence of 2–3% in the general population and 10–15% in inpatient and outpatient mental health institutions.[2]
HPD lies in the dramatic cluster of personality disorders.[3] People with HPD have a high need for attention, make loud and inappropriate appearances, exaggerate their behaviors and emotions, and crave stimulation.[3] They may exhibit sexually provocative behavior, express strong emotions with an impressionistic style, and can be easily influenced by others. Associated features include egocentrism, self-indulgence, continuous longing for appreciation, and persistent manipulative behavior to achieve their own needs.

Between 1938 and 2007 the [MMPI psychopathology] clinical scores of college students rose steadily, especially in moodiness, restlessness, dissatisfaction, and instability.

Sociopathy is therefore not an illness but a strategy. It has been least successful in small societies where both sexes invest heavily in care for their partners and offspring. It has been more successful in larger societies, particularly those where men invest less in partners and offspring. Indeed, because sociopathy does so well in such contexts, it may have hindered the development of larger and more complex societies.

http://jeremynicholl.photoshelter.com/image/I0000HsPys3A9Ve0 The Chechen republic has a population of only 1,268,989, and is as different to Denmark as can be. Denmark, which surrendered in 2 hours to Nazi Germany, has the highest (least masculine) digit ratio in the world, and a very distinctive cooperative politics, so on a variety of reliable indices it is the least sociopathic country in the world. Some time ago a Danish couple were arrested in NYC after leaving their child in a pram outside a restaurant, a common practice in their home country

What does that have to do with the fact that a population smaller than that of many cities being "cooperative" is not that extraordinary? Lots of people aren't like Chechens, have surrendered easily, and have unsupervised kids, many of them much more populous than the Danes.

I didn’t. There are, or have been, civilizations with features more depraved than ours. That exonerates nobody.

If all civilizations are "depraved," that word no longer has any useful meaning. Perhaps you're setting the bar too high.

You don’t see how a patriarchal warrior culture might select for altruism, which later on might be expressed in various ways in large societies?

How would the expansion of the Indo-Europeans within Europe account for the Hajnal line? Their homeland is believed to have been either the area north of the Black Sea or Anatolia. In either case, their genetic impact would have decreased farther north and west from that point of origin.

That pattern is the opposite of the one I'm trying to explain, i.e., a complex of behavioral predispositions that seems centered on the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic and that weakens progressively as one goes farther south and east.

alcoholism kills the superego (or if you prefer, the conscience) which I suppose is one way of saying it causes sociopathy.

The arrow of causality probably runs in the other direction. Sociopaths are likely to become alcoholics because they are impulsive and focused on the present. Not all sociopaths are alcoholics. I know a few who seldom drink.

Serial killers with a lot of children would be evidence for being not sick but selfish from a genetic point of view.

Since the late 1960s, sociopaths have actually had fewer children on average than non-sociopaths. This is largely because more women are practicing birth control when they have sex with them.

the problem with Protestants is twofold – they have replaced the philosophical Jesus Christ with the literal bible – and they have abandoned their Christian good works to government (they have replaced voluntary good works with force)…

Protestants are still performing a lot of good works without government assistance, but those good works are often poorly thought out. It's like the nice lady who takes in one stray cat after another. She's engaging in a kind of moral masturbation that does more harm than good.

We must not throw out the philosophical Christian baby, with the religious Christian bath water.

I know a lot of non-religious philosophical Christians. In some ways, they're worse than the fundamentalists. If you emancipate Christianity from the limitations of religion, you're opening a Pandora's Box whose consequences are not entirely positive.

I’m not into turning the other cheek. When Jayman uses the term “idiot” for opponents, I feel free to call his comments (not him) stupid.

I didn't notice the "idiot" comment, so I should condemn that one as well. Please, we're supposed to be adults here. It takes two to make an argument, and if one person persists in being abusive it's best to ignore him. I'd like to delete such comments but I can't.

I would think familial low IQ is an adaptation even if it limits reproductive success. I take the criterion to be whether it is produced by selection, not whether it facilitates reproduction.

I'm not sure if I follow you. If a trait limits reproductive success, it will gradually disappear from the gene pool. I agree that high IQ is very demanding metabolically, so if you don't need it, it will be selected out of the gene pool.

Peter, We don’t hear much about female hysteria anymore, but we do hear about something called borderline personality disorder. Are they the same thing?

The term "hysteria" has fallen into disfavor. The wiki page says:

Generally, modern medical professionals have given up the use of "hysteria" as a diagnostic category, replacing it with more precisely defined categories such as somatization disorder. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association officially changed the diagnosis of "hysterical neurosis, conversion type" , the most dangerous and effective type, to "conversion disorder".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria

Borderline personality disorder seems to be a larger category that includes hysteria:

Current psychiatric terminology distinguishes two types of disorder that were previously labelled 'hysteria': somatoform and dissociative. There are many rare cases of this disorder in the present when nothing else can be diagnosed to the patients. The dissociative disorders in DSM-IV-TR include dissociative amnesia, dissociative fugue, dissociative identity disorder, depersonalization disorder, and dissociative disorder not otherwise specified. Somatoform disorders include conversion disorder, somatization disorder, pain disorder, hypochondriasis, and body dysmorphic disorder. In somatoform disorders, the patient exhibits physical symptoms such as low back pain or limb paralysis, without apparent physical cause. Additionally, certain culture-bound syndromes such as "ataques de nervios" ("attacks of nerves") identified in Hispanic populations, and popularized by the Almodóvar film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, exemplify psychiatric phenomena that encompass both somatoform and dissociative symptoms and that have been linked to psychological trauma.[7] Recent neuroscientific research, however, is starting to show that there are characteristic patterns of brain activity associated with these states.[8] All these disorders are thought to be unconscious, not feigned or intentional malingering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderline_personality_disorder

How would the expansion of the Indo-Europeans within Europe account for the Hajnal line? Their homeland is believed to have been either the area north of the Black Sea or Anatolia. In either case, their genetic impact would have decreased farther north and west from that point of origin.

That pattern is the opposite of the one I’m trying to explain, i.e., a complex of behavioral predispositions that seems centered on the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic and that weakens progressively as one goes farther south and east.

The Indo-Europeans were mobile, and much of the Black Sea region and Anatolia no longer speak IE languages. Much of the area speak Caucasian and Turkic languages. IE languages are more dominant in Europe. It’s not clear at all that their impact would have decreased linearly farther north and west, and many argue the opposite.

As Hamilton writes, we know how altruism can be selected by patriarchal warrior cultures and isn’t in large communities, so the IEs seem to be a much more plausible source than the large communities you posit.

Ancient DNA from the steppe has shown us Ukrainians and other East Slavs are genetically as close to suspected Proto-Indo-Europeans as any Northwest European, but like non-Indo-European North Caucasians they are firmly on the other side of the Hajnal line.

Sociopathy is therefore not an illness but a strategy. It has been least successful in small societies where both sexes invest heavily in care for their partners and offspring. It has been more successful in larger societies, particularly those where men invest less in partners and offspring. Indeed, because sociopathy does so well in such contexts, it may have hindered the development of larger and more complex societies.

http://jeremynicholl.photoshelter.com/image/I0000HsPys3A9Ve0 The Chechen republic has a population of only 1,268,989, and is as different to Denmark as can be. Denmark, which surrendered in 2 hours to Nazi Germany, has the highest (least masculine) digit ratio in the world, and a very distinctive cooperative politics, so on a variety of reliable indices it is the least sociopathic country in the world. Some time ago a Danish couple were arrested in NYC after leaving their child in a pram outside a restaurant, a common practice in their home country

What does that have to do with the fact that a population smaller than that of many cities being “cooperative” is not that extraordinary? Lots of people aren’t like Chechens, have surrendered easily, and have unsupervised kids, many of them much more populous than the Danes.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2007/12/the_strains_of_danish_commitmeDenmark is such an interesting case because it so closely resembles the kind of society I think the political philosopher John Rawls had in mind in his magnum opus, "A Theory of Justice": economically dynamic egalitarianism.

I may be stupid as well, but I can't see the distinction that you are trying to make here.

A person who is militantly stupid is made stupid by “convictions.’ It isn’t (quite) like saying “you’re a stupid person.” I do think the distinction is weak, and I should not have totally sworn off calling Jayman stupid. [I mean, someone has to say it somewhere, since it censors it on his blog while calling others stupid.]

Jayman’s ignorant alpha male behavior irritates many others. And his intellectual dishonesty. Why it is tolerated a contrarian site eludes me. Commenters have a social duty to put him – on occasion – in his place.

I didn’t. There are, or have been, civilizations with features more depraved than ours. That exonerates nobody.

If all civilizations are "depraved," that word no longer has any useful meaning. Perhaps you're setting the bar too high.

You don’t see how a patriarchal warrior culture might select for altruism, which later on might be expressed in various ways in large societies?

How would the expansion of the Indo-Europeans within Europe account for the Hajnal line? Their homeland is believed to have been either the area north of the Black Sea or Anatolia. In either case, their genetic impact would have decreased farther north and west from that point of origin.

That pattern is the opposite of the one I'm trying to explain, i.e., a complex of behavioral predispositions that seems centered on the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic and that weakens progressively as one goes farther south and east.

alcoholism kills the superego (or if you prefer, the conscience) which I suppose is one way of saying it causes sociopathy.

The arrow of causality probably runs in the other direction. Sociopaths are likely to become alcoholics because they are impulsive and focused on the present. Not all sociopaths are alcoholics. I know a few who seldom drink.

Serial killers with a lot of children would be evidence for being not sick but selfish from a genetic point of view.

Since the late 1960s, sociopaths have actually had fewer children on average than non-sociopaths. This is largely because more women are practicing birth control when they have sex with them.

the problem with Protestants is twofold – they have replaced the philosophical Jesus Christ with the literal bible – and they have abandoned their Christian good works to government (they have replaced voluntary good works with force)…

Protestants are still performing a lot of good works without government assistance, but those good works are often poorly thought out. It's like the nice lady who takes in one stray cat after another. She's engaging in a kind of moral masturbation that does more harm than good.

We must not throw out the philosophical Christian baby, with the religious Christian bath water.

I know a lot of non-religious philosophical Christians. In some ways, they're worse than the fundamentalists. If you emancipate Christianity from the limitations of religion, you're opening a Pandora's Box whose consequences are not entirely positive.

I’m not into turning the other cheek. When Jayman uses the term “idiot” for opponents, I feel free to call his comments (not him) stupid.

I didn't notice the "idiot" comment, so I should condemn that one as well. Please, we're supposed to be adults here. It takes two to make an argument, and if one person persists in being abusive it's best to ignore him. I'd like to delete such comments but I can't.

I would think familial low IQ is an adaptation even if it limits reproductive success. I take the criterion to be whether it is produced by selection, not whether it facilitates reproduction.

I'm not sure if I follow you. If a trait limits reproductive success, it will gradually disappear from the gene pool. I agree that high IQ is very demanding metabolically, so if you don't need it, it will be selected out of the gene pool.

Peter, We don’t hear much about female hysteria anymore, but we do hear about something called borderline personality disorder. Are they the same thing?

The term "hysteria" has fallen into disfavor. The wiki page says:

Generally, modern medical professionals have given up the use of "hysteria" as a diagnostic category, replacing it with more precisely defined categories such as somatization disorder. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association officially changed the diagnosis of "hysterical neurosis, conversion type" , the most dangerous and effective type, to "conversion disorder".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria

Borderline personality disorder seems to be a larger category that includes hysteria:

Current psychiatric terminology distinguishes two types of disorder that were previously labelled 'hysteria': somatoform and dissociative. There are many rare cases of this disorder in the present when nothing else can be diagnosed to the patients. The dissociative disorders in DSM-IV-TR include dissociative amnesia, dissociative fugue, dissociative identity disorder, depersonalization disorder, and dissociative disorder not otherwise specified. Somatoform disorders include conversion disorder, somatization disorder, pain disorder, hypochondriasis, and body dysmorphic disorder. In somatoform disorders, the patient exhibits physical symptoms such as low back pain or limb paralysis, without apparent physical cause. Additionally, certain culture-bound syndromes such as "ataques de nervios" ("attacks of nerves") identified in Hispanic populations, and popularized by the Almodóvar film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, exemplify psychiatric phenomena that encompass both somatoform and dissociative symptoms and that have been linked to psychological trauma.[7] Recent neuroscientific research, however, is starting to show that there are characteristic patterns of brain activity associated with these states.[8] All these disorders are thought to be unconscious, not feigned or intentional malingering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderline_personality_disorder

Please, we’re supposed to be adults here. It takes two to make an argument, and if one person persists in being abusive it’s best to ignore him. I’d like to delete such comments but I can’t.

Why???

Do you need a safe space? (I’m glad you lack this power, in the interest of ideals of free speech.) Before it was fear of prosecution for thought crimes. Now it’s what?

Why do the best discussions occur, as in Karlin or Sailer, where no effort is made to suppress or discourage posters because the moderator doesn’t like the way they express their opinions? Take a cue!

I disagree; as far as I know Sailer does delete comments he deems too extreme. And some of the comment threads in Karlin's blog have been unreadable...too many Holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists who get personally insulting towards anybody who disagrees with them.
Ron Unz should really give Peter Frost the power to moderate and delete comments, it's overdue.

Why do the best discussions occur, as in Karlin or Sailer, where no effort is made to suppress or discourage posters because the moderator doesn’t like the way they express their opinions?

Steve Sailer suppresses my comments all the fricking time; and, what's more, there isn't even a reason for it. I have not insulted or threatened anybody, I say nothing in a combative tone, and everything I write is on topic and as relevant as I can make it--so much so that I often see other Unz writers echoing my thoughts a day or a week after I wrote them.

But none of this is ever allowed through on Sailer's blog. I think he just likes to maintain a certain circle-jerk atmosphere typical of condescending, 50-ish, SWPL types latterly converted to HBD as a means of easing their frustrations with life.

Please, we’re supposed to be adults here. It takes two to make an argument, and if one person persists in being abusive it’s best to ignore him. I’d like to delete such comments but I can’t.

Why???

Do you need a safe space? (I'm glad you lack this power, in the interest of ideals of free speech.) Before it was fear of prosecution for thought crimes. Now it's what?

Why do the best discussions occur, as in Karlin or Sailer, where no effort is made to suppress or discourage posters because the moderator doesn't like the way they express their opinions? Take a cue!

I disagree; as far as I know Sailer does delete comments he deems too extreme. And some of the comment threads in Karlin’s blog have been unreadable…too many Holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists who get personally insulting towards anybody who disagrees with them.
Ron Unz should really give Peter Frost the power to moderate and delete comments, it’s overdue.

Yes, but Peter just admitted that he would censor comments for mere rudeness. He would even censor Jayman for calling the authors of DSM morons and idiots. While one wishes Jayman would decide on a more definite IQ category, as well as deal with problems I've already mentioned, Jayman's rude personality does not warrant his being censored - although sometimes he should be censured.

Now, I appreciate that this discussion is a diversion. But it's what happens when you try to regulate mere manners. Commenters aren't drones existing for the benefit of bloggers.

Ron Unz should really give Peter Frost the power to moderate and delete comments, it’s overdue.

When Peter's posts first showed up here, he had moderation power. He and Unz got into some sort of a tiff and Unz took it away.

I agree with you that he should have the right to moderate his blog. I disagree with Diamond. I like to read the comments, but I spend a lot of wasted time placing the last iteration of some handle on the CTI list.

I don't understand why there can't be some kind of branching of the threads so that knowledgeable people can express their ideas and questions and each person can decide whether they want to pursue that particular thread or not.

Sociopathy doesn’t look like a mental illness, being much less incapacitating than schizophrenia and most mental disorders.

Sociopaths follow a life strategy that is adaptive for themselves but ruinous for society.

If it is incapacitating, it can scarcely be called “adaptive.”

Psychopathy is the far end of an adaptive trait, but (I propose) it should be defined as disorder when it presents such an extreme that it uniformly represents an obstacle for the individual. It is uniformly too much of something that can, in moderation, be a good thing. (Such as promoting creativity.) [It should go without saying there's a fair element of arbitrariness in drawing the line in practice.]

You paint a rosy picture of psychopaths. Sure, a few highly intelligent psychopaths do well; but then, they would have done better had they not been psychopaths. Most psychopaths are also “antisocial personalities.” They don’t do well in life. If they’re negro, they go to prison. (And it’s a category error to equate, Jayman fashion, psychiatric adaptation with reproductive fitness.)

On another matter, sociopathy and clannishness do go together, and the new Honesty scale in the HEXACO system can probably serve as proxy for both. Commenters have made the argument has made that serving your clan requires some morality. Well, the isolated psychopath is the most severe case, but everyone knows that the typical severe narcissist is surround by cronies. Clannishness of all kinds demands (relatively) low universalism.

Psychopathy is the far end of an adaptive trait, but (I propose) it should be defined as disorder when it presents such an extreme that it uniformly represents an obstacle for the individual. It is uniformly too much of something that can, in moderation, be a good thing. (Such as promoting creativity.) [It should go without saying there's a fair element of arbitrariness in drawing the line in practice.]

You paint a rosy picture of psychopaths. Sure, a few highly intelligent psychopaths do well; but then, they would have done better had they not been psychopaths. Most psychopaths are also “antisocial personalities.” They don’t do well in life. If they’re negro, they go to prison.

When we're evaluating if a phenotype is an adaption, we have to evaluate whether or not it was adaptive in past environments, not the present one.

I disagree; as far as I know Sailer does delete comments he deems too extreme. And some of the comment threads in Karlin's blog have been unreadable...too many Holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists who get personally insulting towards anybody who disagrees with them.
Ron Unz should really give Peter Frost the power to moderate and delete comments, it's overdue.

Yes, but Peter just admitted that he would censor comments for mere rudeness. He would even censor Jayman for calling the authors of DSM morons and idiots. While one wishes Jayman would decide on a more definite IQ category, as well as deal with problems I’ve already mentioned, Jayman’s rude personality does not warrant his being censored – although sometimes he should be censured.

Now, I appreciate that this discussion is a diversion. But it’s what happens when you try to regulate mere manners. Commenters aren’t drones existing for the benefit of bloggers.

John Rogers managed to pull a fast one on some of the “smartest investors” (Och-Ziff Management; Farallon Capital Management; very well-esteemed hedge funds) only to go bankrupt a few years later. I knew someone that worked for this guy and according to him, all he was good for was “having the balls to call rich people and ask for their money on the spot”. I guess that’s a talent.

Please, we’re supposed to be adults here. It takes two to make an argument, and if one person persists in being abusive it’s best to ignore him. I’d like to delete such comments but I can’t.

Why???

Do you need a safe space? (I'm glad you lack this power, in the interest of ideals of free speech.) Before it was fear of prosecution for thought crimes. Now it's what?

Why do the best discussions occur, as in Karlin or Sailer, where no effort is made to suppress or discourage posters because the moderator doesn't like the way they express their opinions? Take a cue!

Why do the best discussions occur, as in Karlin or Sailer, where no effort is made to suppress or discourage posters because the moderator doesn’t like the way they express their opinions?

Steve Sailer suppresses my comments all the fricking time; and, what’s more, there isn’t even a reason for it. I have not insulted or threatened anybody, I say nothing in a combative tone, and everything I write is on topic and as relevant as I can make it–so much so that I often see other Unz writers echoing my thoughts a day or a week after I wrote them.

But none of this is ever allowed through on Sailer’s blog. I think he just likes to maintain a certain circle-jerk atmosphere typical of condescending, 50-ish, SWPL types latterly converted to HBD as a means of easing their frustrations with life.

I disagree; as far as I know Sailer does delete comments he deems too extreme. And some of the comment threads in Karlin's blog have been unreadable...too many Holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists who get personally insulting towards anybody who disagrees with them.
Ron Unz should really give Peter Frost the power to moderate and delete comments, it's overdue.

Ron Unz should really give Peter Frost the power to moderate and delete comments, it’s overdue.

When Peter’s posts first showed up here, he had moderation power. He and Unz got into some sort of a tiff and Unz took it away.

I agree with you that he should have the right to moderate his blog. I disagree with Diamond. I like to read the comments, but I spend a lot of wasted time placing the last iteration of some handle on the CTI list.

I don’t understand why there can’t be some kind of branching of the threads so that knowledgeable people can express their ideas and questions and each person can decide whether they want to pursue that particular thread or not.

IE languages are more dominant in Europe. It’s not clear at all that their impact would have decreased linearly farther north and west, and many argue the opposite.

Actually, most linguists argue that the linguistic imprint of Indo-European decreases as one moves north and west. The Germanic languages seem to be the result of an interaction between Indo-European and a pre-Indo-European substrate (see Grimm’s Law).

As Hamilton writes, we know how altruism can be selected by patriarchal warrior cultures

Please explain to me how altruism would be favored in that model. Take my hand and walk me through your logic. Yes, I’m familiar with Hamilton’s work, and this is one case where he was widely ridiculed by his peers.

Group selection is very controversial. There are only a limited number of models (kin selection in small bands and the haystack model) which can make it work.

Do you need a safe space? (I’m glad you lack this power, in the interest of ideals of free speech.) Before it was fear of prosecution for thought crimes. Now it’s what?

Abusive language isn’t conducive to intelligent debate. I’m not a libertarian, so please don’t try to shame me into complying with libertarian ideals. As for Steve Sailer and Anatoly Karliln, they regularly delete many comments.

I made a decision to continue with my postings until the end of this month. If the situation doesn’t improve, I won’t continue in the new year.

Actually, most linguists argue that the linguistic imprint of Indo-European decreases as one moves north and west. The Germanic languages seem to be the result of an interaction between Indo-European and a pre-Indo-European substrate (see Grimm’s Law).

Greek and Sanskrit are believed to have significant non-IE substrates, and Grimm's Law is also put forward as evidence for the Germanic languages not having a substrate and having just mutated on their own.

Please explain to me how altruism would be favored in that model. Take my hand and walk me through your logic. Yes, I’m familiar with Hamilton’s work, and this is one case where he was widely ridiculed by his peers.

The IEs had a very patriarchal and patrilineal warrior culture, and such cultures can be very conducive to the kin selection of altruism.

Hamilton was ridiculed because he was regarded as politically incorrect in this case. Critics called this paper "fascist".

Abusive language isn’t conducive to intelligent debate. I’m not a libertarian, so please don’t try to shame me into complying with libertarian ideals.

Actually, what I was shaming you about is your previous pretension to fear prosecution.

So what if it's not conducive? It doesn't by any means preclude it. People can ignore insults or respond while addressing primarily content. You're a Puritan who doesn't understand the difference. That's why you should never moderate a discussion - or pollute it with your trying to shame others into expressing themselves in your manner.

On being libertarian - you can sure whine about the illiberalism of students to fool someone.

IE languages are more dominant in Europe. It’s not clear at all that their impact would have decreased linearly farther north and west, and many argue the opposite.

Actually, most linguists argue that the linguistic imprint of Indo-European decreases as one moves north and west. The Germanic languages seem to be the result of an interaction between Indo-European and a pre-Indo-European substrate (see Grimm's Law).

As Hamilton writes, we know how altruism can be selected by patriarchal warrior cultures

Please explain to me how altruism would be favored in that model. Take my hand and walk me through your logic. Yes, I'm familiar with Hamilton's work, and this is one case where he was widely ridiculed by his peers.

Group selection is very controversial. There are only a limited number of models (kin selection in small bands and the haystack model) which can make it work.

Do you need a safe space? (I’m glad you lack this power, in the interest of ideals of free speech.) Before it was fear of prosecution for thought crimes. Now it’s what?

Abusive language isn't conducive to intelligent debate. I'm not a libertarian, so please don't try to shame me into complying with libertarian ideals. As for Steve Sailer and Anatoly Karliln, they regularly delete many comments.

I made a decision to continue with my postings until the end of this month. If the situation doesn't improve, I won't continue in the new year.

If you don’t blog here I would hope that you would continue your bloggin elsewhere as I find what you have to say very enlightening.

What does that have to do with the fact that a population smaller than that of many cities being "cooperative" is not that extraordinary? Lots of people aren't like Chechens, have surrendered easily, and have unsupervised kids, many of them much more populous than the Danes.

Me too. Peter Frost has lots of interesting ideas, and I especially appreciate how he interprets historical and contemporary social trends in light of anthropological and ethnographic data --whether it's flattering or not.

I didn’t. There are, or have been, civilizations with features more depraved than ours. That exonerates nobody.

If all civilizations are "depraved," that word no longer has any useful meaning. Perhaps you're setting the bar too high.

You don’t see how a patriarchal warrior culture might select for altruism, which later on might be expressed in various ways in large societies?

How would the expansion of the Indo-Europeans within Europe account for the Hajnal line? Their homeland is believed to have been either the area north of the Black Sea or Anatolia. In either case, their genetic impact would have decreased farther north and west from that point of origin.

That pattern is the opposite of the one I'm trying to explain, i.e., a complex of behavioral predispositions that seems centered on the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic and that weakens progressively as one goes farther south and east.

alcoholism kills the superego (or if you prefer, the conscience) which I suppose is one way of saying it causes sociopathy.

The arrow of causality probably runs in the other direction. Sociopaths are likely to become alcoholics because they are impulsive and focused on the present. Not all sociopaths are alcoholics. I know a few who seldom drink.

Serial killers with a lot of children would be evidence for being not sick but selfish from a genetic point of view.

Since the late 1960s, sociopaths have actually had fewer children on average than non-sociopaths. This is largely because more women are practicing birth control when they have sex with them.

the problem with Protestants is twofold – they have replaced the philosophical Jesus Christ with the literal bible – and they have abandoned their Christian good works to government (they have replaced voluntary good works with force)…

Protestants are still performing a lot of good works without government assistance, but those good works are often poorly thought out. It's like the nice lady who takes in one stray cat after another. She's engaging in a kind of moral masturbation that does more harm than good.

We must not throw out the philosophical Christian baby, with the religious Christian bath water.

I know a lot of non-religious philosophical Christians. In some ways, they're worse than the fundamentalists. If you emancipate Christianity from the limitations of religion, you're opening a Pandora's Box whose consequences are not entirely positive.

I’m not into turning the other cheek. When Jayman uses the term “idiot” for opponents, I feel free to call his comments (not him) stupid.

I didn't notice the "idiot" comment, so I should condemn that one as well. Please, we're supposed to be adults here. It takes two to make an argument, and if one person persists in being abusive it's best to ignore him. I'd like to delete such comments but I can't.

I would think familial low IQ is an adaptation even if it limits reproductive success. I take the criterion to be whether it is produced by selection, not whether it facilitates reproduction.

I'm not sure if I follow you. If a trait limits reproductive success, it will gradually disappear from the gene pool. I agree that high IQ is very demanding metabolically, so if you don't need it, it will be selected out of the gene pool.

Peter, We don’t hear much about female hysteria anymore, but we do hear about something called borderline personality disorder. Are they the same thing?

The term "hysteria" has fallen into disfavor. The wiki page says:

Generally, modern medical professionals have given up the use of "hysteria" as a diagnostic category, replacing it with more precisely defined categories such as somatization disorder. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association officially changed the diagnosis of "hysterical neurosis, conversion type" , the most dangerous and effective type, to "conversion disorder".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria

Borderline personality disorder seems to be a larger category that includes hysteria:

Current psychiatric terminology distinguishes two types of disorder that were previously labelled 'hysteria': somatoform and dissociative. There are many rare cases of this disorder in the present when nothing else can be diagnosed to the patients. The dissociative disorders in DSM-IV-TR include dissociative amnesia, dissociative fugue, dissociative identity disorder, depersonalization disorder, and dissociative disorder not otherwise specified. Somatoform disorders include conversion disorder, somatization disorder, pain disorder, hypochondriasis, and body dysmorphic disorder. In somatoform disorders, the patient exhibits physical symptoms such as low back pain or limb paralysis, without apparent physical cause. Additionally, certain culture-bound syndromes such as "ataques de nervios" ("attacks of nerves") identified in Hispanic populations, and popularized by the Almodóvar film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, exemplify psychiatric phenomena that encompass both somatoform and dissociative symptoms and that have been linked to psychological trauma.[7] Recent neuroscientific research, however, is starting to show that there are characteristic patterns of brain activity associated with these states.[8] All these disorders are thought to be unconscious, not feigned or intentional malingering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderline_personality_disorder

We must not throw out the philosophical Christian baby, with the religious Christian bath water.

I know a lot of non-religious philosophical Christians. In some ways, they’re worse than the fundamentalists. If you emancipate Christianity from the limitations of religion, you’re opening a Pandora’s Box whose consequences are not entirely positive.

I like the word emancipate. Clearly religious Christianity is shackled by the Old Testament. Martin Luther did Christianity a great service and a great disservice. He liberate Christianity from the dictates of the priesthood. But then he shackled Christianity to the Old Testament bible. He replaced the authority of the priesthood with the authority of the bible.

Religions have two parts to them, they tell us how to relate to God, and they tell us how to relate to each other (i.e., they give us a philosophy for living) . The gods found in the OT and the NT are very different. For simplicity sake let us say God 1.0 and God 2.0. God 1.0 is mean, tribal, and unforgiving, and God 2.0 is hopeful, universal , and forgiving. Jesus gave us God 2.0, Luther took us back to God 1.0

Clearly the philosophies that follow these different gods are dissimilar . The idealistic Christian philosophy that flows from God 2.0 says be hopeful, protect life, love your neighbor as you love yourself, seek truth, and forgive — these ideals lead us to producing personal freedom and association. How can we fear that?

A modern distortion of God 2.0 is the magical belief that we can change people by our actions. Granted, some people, maybe even most, can be won over by kindness or "love", but all are not. Sociopaths see kindness as a weakness that invites aggression.

Jesus was not as stupid as our modern magical believers, but the doctrine that you change the world by "love" is a widespread delusion.

IE languages are more dominant in Europe. It’s not clear at all that their impact would have decreased linearly farther north and west, and many argue the opposite.

Actually, most linguists argue that the linguistic imprint of Indo-European decreases as one moves north and west. The Germanic languages seem to be the result of an interaction between Indo-European and a pre-Indo-European substrate (see Grimm's Law).

As Hamilton writes, we know how altruism can be selected by patriarchal warrior cultures

Please explain to me how altruism would be favored in that model. Take my hand and walk me through your logic. Yes, I'm familiar with Hamilton's work, and this is one case where he was widely ridiculed by his peers.

Group selection is very controversial. There are only a limited number of models (kin selection in small bands and the haystack model) which can make it work.

Do you need a safe space? (I’m glad you lack this power, in the interest of ideals of free speech.) Before it was fear of prosecution for thought crimes. Now it’s what?

Abusive language isn't conducive to intelligent debate. I'm not a libertarian, so please don't try to shame me into complying with libertarian ideals. As for Steve Sailer and Anatoly Karliln, they regularly delete many comments.

I made a decision to continue with my postings until the end of this month. If the situation doesn't improve, I won't continue in the new year.

Actually, most linguists argue that the linguistic imprint of Indo-European decreases as one moves north and west. The Germanic languages seem to be the result of an interaction between Indo-European and a pre-Indo-European substrate (see Grimm’s Law).

Greek and Sanskrit are believed to have significant non-IE substrates, and Grimm’s Law is also put forward as evidence for the Germanic languages not having a substrate and having just mutated on their own.

Please explain to me how altruism would be favored in that model. Take my hand and walk me through your logic. Yes, I’m familiar with Hamilton’s work, and this is one case where he was widely ridiculed by his peers.

The IEs had a very patriarchal and patrilineal warrior culture, and such cultures can be very conducive to the kin selection of altruism.

Hamilton was ridiculed because he was regarded as politically incorrect in this case. Critics called this paper “fascist”.

Sociopathy doesn’t look like a mental illness, being much less incapacitating than schizophrenia and most mental disorders.

Sociopaths follow a life strategy that is adaptive for themselves but ruinous for society.

If it is incapacitating, it can scarcely be called "adaptive."

Psychopathy is the far end of an adaptive trait, but (I propose) it should be defined as disorder when it presents such an extreme that it uniformly represents an obstacle for the individual. It is uniformly too much of something that can, in moderation, be a good thing. (Such as promoting creativity.) [It should go without saying there's a fair element of arbitrariness in drawing the line in practice.]

You paint a rosy picture of psychopaths. Sure, a few highly intelligent psychopaths do well; but then, they would have done better had they not been psychopaths. Most psychopaths are also "antisocial personalities." They don't do well in life. If they're negro, they go to prison. (And it's a category error to equate, Jayman fashion, psychiatric adaptation with reproductive fitness.)

On another matter, sociopathy and clannishness do go together, and the new Honesty scale in the HEXACO system can probably serve as proxy for both. Commenters have made the argument has made that serving your clan requires some morality. Well, the isolated psychopath is the most severe case, but everyone knows that the typical severe narcissist is surround by cronies. Clannishness of all kinds demands (relatively) low universalism.

Psychopathy is the far end of an adaptive trait, but (I propose) it should be defined as disorder when it presents such an extreme that it uniformly represents an obstacle for the individual. It is uniformly too much of something that can, in moderation, be a good thing. (Such as promoting creativity.) [It should go without saying there's a fair element of arbitrariness in drawing the line in practice.]

You paint a rosy picture of psychopaths. Sure, a few highly intelligent psychopaths do well; but then, they would have done better had they not been psychopaths. Most psychopaths are also “antisocial personalities.” They don’t do well in life. If they’re negro, they go to prison.

When we’re evaluating if a phenotype is an adaption, we have to evaluate whether or not it was adaptive in past environments, not the present one.

Can you point to evidence? (As lawyers and judges know, using "clearly" is commonly a giveaway that there's none.)

I've seen no reason to conclude psychopathy was more useful in the past than it is now. Psychopathic traits are more useful today (and yesterday) than they were in the primordial past, as Peter Frost argues. But is frank psychopathy useful? I think not. Multiple genes are selected for useful psychopathic traits; the outcome becomes positively harmful, however, for outliers who happen to get too many psychopathic genes. Those are the individuals we term "psychopaths" - or at least pathological narcissists.

We must not throw out the philosophical Christian baby, with the religious Christian bath water.

I know a lot of non-religious philosophical Christians. In some ways, they’re worse than the fundamentalists. If you emancipate Christianity from the limitations of religion, you’re opening a Pandora’s Box whose consequences are not entirely positive.

I like the word emancipate. Clearly religious Christianity is shackled by the Old Testament. Martin Luther did Christianity a great service and a great disservice. He liberate Christianity from the dictates of the priesthood. But then he shackled Christianity to the Old Testament bible. He replaced the authority of the priesthood with the authority of the bible.

Religions have two parts to them, they tell us how to relate to God, and they tell us how to relate to each other (i.e., they give us a philosophy for living) . The gods found in the OT and the NT are very different. For simplicity sake let us say God 1.0 and God 2.0. God 1.0 is mean, tribal, and unforgiving, and God 2.0 is hopeful, universal , and forgiving. Jesus gave us God 2.0, Luther took us back to God 1.0

Clearly the philosophies that follow these different gods are dissimilar . The idealistic Christian philosophy that flows from God 2.0 says be hopeful, protect life, love your neighbor as you love yourself, seek truth, and forgive --- these ideals lead us to producing personal freedom and association. How can we fear that?

How can we fear that?

Pathological altruism.

A modern distortion of God 2.0 is the magical belief that we can change people by our actions. Granted, some people, maybe even most, can be won over by kindness or “love”, but all are not. Sociopaths see kindness as a weakness that invites aggression.

Jesus was not as stupid as our modern magical believers, but the doctrine that you change the world by “love” is a widespread delusion.

If you don’t blog here I would hope that you would continue your bloggin elsewhere

It will be a difficult decision for me. The legal environment in Canada has changed over the past few months, especially with Bill 59. It’s not just the $10,000 fine. I could also be put on a list of “terrorists,” which would make it hard for me to travel abroad, get my passport renewed, or do jobs that require RCMP clearance (yes, I’ve done that kind of work).

The idealistic Christian philosophy that flows from God 2.0 says be hopeful, protect life, love your neighbor as you love yourself, seek truth, and forgive — these ideals lead us to producing personal freedom and association. How can we fear that?

If I’m forced to love my neighbor as myself, I can no longer hold beliefs that my neighbor finds repulsive. That’s a recipe for totalitarianism. Freedom of association is also the freedom not to associate.

Greek and Sanskrit are believed to have significant non-IE substrates, and Grimm’s Law is also put forward as evidence for the Germanic languages not having a substrate and having just mutated on their own.

Most Indo-European languages show some interaction with a non-IE substrate, usually in the form of word borrowing. Grimm’s Law is different in that we see a consistent shift in pronunciation for all words. This is what happens when large numbers of people learn a new language. Their original system of pronunciation is carried over.

I’m sure you’re convinced there are alternate explanations. But it’s not enough to convince yourself. You have to convince other people, like me. So far I’m no convinced. We still come back to my first question: How does the Indo-European expansion explain the Hajnal line?

The IEs had a very patriarchal and patrilineal warrior culture, and such cultures can be very conducive to the kin selection of altruism.

Kin selection can explain the evolution of altruistic behavior only within a very small group, like a hunting band. The Indo-Europeans were organized into much larger groups. Moreover, kin selection would not normally favor behaviors that benefit people who are not close relatives.

Hamilton was ridiculed because he was regarded as politically incorrect in this case. Critics called this paper “fascist”.

Some did. Most thought it was just plain silly.

I’ve experienced ridicule, and I’ve experienced political correctness. There’s no comparison between the two. Hamilton was merely ridiculed.

Most psychopaths are also “antisocial personalities.” They don’t do well in life. If they’re negro, they go to prison.

In terms of reproductive success, they did very well in life between the 1920s and the late 1960s. Even today, they’re almost on a par with non-psychopaths. As for prison, many jurisdictions allow prisoners to have conjugal visits with spouses or other partners.

The idealistic Christian philosophy that flows from God 2.0 says be hopeful, protect life, love your neighbor as you love yourself, seek truth, and forgive — these ideals lead us to producing personal freedom and association. How can we fear that?

If I’m forced to love my neighbor as myself, I can no longer hold beliefs that my neighbor finds repulsive. That’s a recipe for totalitarianism. Freedom of association is also the freedom not to associate.

Why do people automatically think coercion. Philosophical Christianity is idealistic and volitional. Implied in the word ideal is goodness. Philosophical Christianity guides us to goodness. Force is for Old Testament God 1.0 - not the Christian God 2.0.

Of course people are not going to always love their neighbor as they love themselves. Love your neighbor as you love yourself in not a command – it is a guide. When you love yourself – you seek a future. It simple means take actions that both enhances you future and your neighbor’s future. It says go for win-win.

I'm familiar with Grimm's Law. As I said, it's also cited as evidence for a regular sound change that wasn't influenced by a substrate.

The IEs were organized into much larger groups that were highly patriarchal and patrilineal, and in which prestige and status were conferred on heroic males and their exploits, and on one's proximity to their patrilines. Heroic exploits that benefit people who are not close relatives while conferring extra status on close relatives ensure that such altruistic behaviors persist and aren't burned out benefiting people who aren't close relatives. Such genes and cultures may have decreased as you go south and east because historically there have been larger panmictic populations there that as Hamilton notes, tend to burn out such behaviors.

How would the expansion of the Indo-Europeans within Europe account for the Hajnal line? Their homeland is believed to have been either the area north of the Black Sea or Anatolia. In either case, their genetic impact would have decreased farther north and west from that point of origin.

That pattern is the opposite of the one I’m trying to explain, i.e., a complex of behavioral predispositions that seems centered on the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic and that weakens progressively as one goes farther south and east.

The Indo-Europeans were mobile, and much of the Black Sea region and Anatolia no longer speak IE languages. Much of the area speak Caucasian and Turkic languages. IE languages are more dominant in Europe. It's not clear at all that their impact would have decreased linearly farther north and west, and many argue the opposite.

As Hamilton writes, we know how altruism can be selected by patriarchal warrior cultures and isn't in large communities, so the IEs seem to be a much more plausible source than the large communities you posit.

Ancient DNA from the steppe has shown us Ukrainians and other East Slavs are genetically as close to suspected Proto-Indo-Europeans as any Northwest European, but like non-Indo-European North Caucasians they are firmly on the other side of the Hajnal line.

The Hajnal line also separates Ireland from Britain, despite the fact that the Irish and British cluster together genetically and are closer relative to other Europeans. The line just marks differences in average age of marriage.

If you don’t blog here I would hope that you would continue your bloggin elsewhere

It will be a difficult decision for me. The legal environment in Canada has changed over the past few months, especially with Bill 59. It's not just the $10,000 fine. I could also be put on a list of "terrorists," which would make it hard for me to travel abroad, get my passport renewed, or do jobs that require RCMP clearance (yes, I've done that kind of work).

The idealistic Christian philosophy that flows from God 2.0 says be hopeful, protect life, love your neighbor as you love yourself, seek truth, and forgive — these ideals lead us to producing personal freedom and association. How can we fear that?

If I'm forced to love my neighbor as myself, I can no longer hold beliefs that my neighbor finds repulsive. That's a recipe for totalitarianism. Freedom of association is also the freedom not to associate.

Greek and Sanskrit are believed to have significant non-IE substrates, and Grimm’s Law is also put forward as evidence for the Germanic languages not having a substrate and having just mutated on their own.

Most Indo-European languages show some interaction with a non-IE substrate, usually in the form of word borrowing. Grimm's Law is different in that we see a consistent shift in pronunciation for all words. This is what happens when large numbers of people learn a new language. Their original system of pronunciation is carried over.

I'm sure you're convinced there are alternate explanations. But it's not enough to convince yourself. You have to convince other people, like me. So far I'm no convinced. We still come back to my first question: How does the Indo-European expansion explain the Hajnal line?

The IEs had a very patriarchal and patrilineal warrior culture, and such cultures can be very conducive to the kin selection of altruism.

Kin selection can explain the evolution of altruistic behavior only within a very small group, like a hunting band. The Indo-Europeans were organized into much larger groups. Moreover, kin selection would not normally favor behaviors that benefit people who are not close relatives.

Hamilton was ridiculed because he was regarded as politically incorrect in this case. Critics called this paper “fascist”.

Some did. Most thought it was just plain silly.

I've experienced ridicule, and I've experienced political correctness. There's no comparison between the two. Hamilton was merely ridiculed.

Most psychopaths are also “antisocial personalities.” They don’t do well in life. If they’re negro, they go to prison.

In terms of reproductive success, they did very well in life between the 1920s and the late 1960s. Even today, they're almost on a par with non-psychopaths. As for prison, many jurisdictions allow prisoners to have conjugal visits with spouses or other partners.

The idealistic Christian philosophy that flows from God 2.0 says be hopeful, protect life, love your neighbor as you love yourself, seek truth, and forgive — these ideals lead us to producing personal freedom and association. How can we fear that?

If I’m forced to love my neighbor as myself, I can no longer hold beliefs that my neighbor finds repulsive. That’s a recipe for totalitarianism. Freedom of association is also the freedom not to associate.

Why do people automatically think coercion. Philosophical Christianity is idealistic and volitional. Implied in the word ideal is goodness. Philosophical Christianity guides us to goodness. Force is for Old Testament God 1.0 – not the Christian God 2.0.

Of course people are not going to always love their neighbor as they love themselves. Love your neighbor as you love yourself in not a command – it is a guide. When you love yourself – you seek a future. It simple means take actions that both enhances you future and your neighbor’s future. It says go for win-win.

You read my comment as if I had said, "sins found exclusively in the West."

I didn't. There are, or have been, civilizations with features more depraved than ours. That exonerates nobody.

Further, if the slip-slidin' West persists in defining evil as two standard deviations beneath some ever-declining global norm, we'll soon arrive in a condition where everyone is doing the worst thing he can think of just to keep up with the neighbors. So here's a captive... shall I burn him alive or behead him and post the fun on Youtube?

Yes, perhaps I jumped too quickly. Result of years of indoctrination by the MSM & academia on the sins and evils of the “west”, which virtually every poor person in the world seems to think will give them a better life.

Group selection is very controversial. There are only a limited number of models (kin selection in small bands and the haystack model) which can make it work.

Group A and B are in conflict. They can be distinguished genetically. Group A kills all of group B. Group B leaves no descendants. The genetic material that group A possesses survives and leaves descendants.

It will be a difficult decision for me. The legal environment in Canada has changed

You need to come back to the US. I think you said you were here when you were young. Besides, some of us here want to choose up sides and fight for or against this monster.

Psychopathy is the far end of an adaptive trait, but (I propose) it should be defined as disorder when it presents such an extreme that it uniformly represents an obstacle for the individual. It is uniformly too much of something that can, in moderation, be a good thing. (Such as promoting creativity.) [It should go without saying there's a fair element of arbitrariness in drawing the line in practice.]

You paint a rosy picture of psychopaths. Sure, a few highly intelligent psychopaths do well; but then, they would have done better had they not been psychopaths. Most psychopaths are also “antisocial personalities.” They don’t do well in life. If they’re negro, they go to prison.

When we're evaluating if a phenotype is an adaption, we have to evaluate whether or not it was adaptive in past environments, not the present one.

Psychopathic traits clearly were.

Psychopathic traits clearly were [useful in the past].

Can you point to evidence? (As lawyers and judges know, using “clearly” is commonly a giveaway that there’s none.)

I’ve seen no reason to conclude psychopathy was more useful in the past than it is now. Psychopathic traits are more useful today (and yesterday) than they were in the primordial past, as Peter Frost argues. But is frank psychopathy useful? I think not. Multiple genes are selected for useful psychopathic traits; the outcome becomes positively harmful, however, for outliers who happen to get too many psychopathic genes. Those are the individuals we term “psychopaths” – or at least pathological narcissists.

If you don’t blog here I would hope that you would continue your bloggin elsewhere

It will be a difficult decision for me. The legal environment in Canada has changed over the past few months, especially with Bill 59. It's not just the $10,000 fine. I could also be put on a list of "terrorists," which would make it hard for me to travel abroad, get my passport renewed, or do jobs that require RCMP clearance (yes, I've done that kind of work).

The idealistic Christian philosophy that flows from God 2.0 says be hopeful, protect life, love your neighbor as you love yourself, seek truth, and forgive — these ideals lead us to producing personal freedom and association. How can we fear that?

If I'm forced to love my neighbor as myself, I can no longer hold beliefs that my neighbor finds repulsive. That's a recipe for totalitarianism. Freedom of association is also the freedom not to associate.

Greek and Sanskrit are believed to have significant non-IE substrates, and Grimm’s Law is also put forward as evidence for the Germanic languages not having a substrate and having just mutated on their own.

Most Indo-European languages show some interaction with a non-IE substrate, usually in the form of word borrowing. Grimm's Law is different in that we see a consistent shift in pronunciation for all words. This is what happens when large numbers of people learn a new language. Their original system of pronunciation is carried over.

I'm sure you're convinced there are alternate explanations. But it's not enough to convince yourself. You have to convince other people, like me. So far I'm no convinced. We still come back to my first question: How does the Indo-European expansion explain the Hajnal line?

The IEs had a very patriarchal and patrilineal warrior culture, and such cultures can be very conducive to the kin selection of altruism.

Kin selection can explain the evolution of altruistic behavior only within a very small group, like a hunting band. The Indo-Europeans were organized into much larger groups. Moreover, kin selection would not normally favor behaviors that benefit people who are not close relatives.

Hamilton was ridiculed because he was regarded as politically incorrect in this case. Critics called this paper “fascist”.

Some did. Most thought it was just plain silly.

I've experienced ridicule, and I've experienced political correctness. There's no comparison between the two. Hamilton was merely ridiculed.

Most psychopaths are also “antisocial personalities.” They don’t do well in life. If they’re negro, they go to prison.

In terms of reproductive success, they did very well in life between the 1920s and the late 1960s. Even today, they're almost on a par with non-psychopaths. As for prison, many jurisdictions allow prisoners to have conjugal visits with spouses or other partners.

I’m familiar with Grimm’s Law. As I said, it’s also cited as evidence for a regular sound change that wasn’t influenced by a substrate.

The IEs were organized into much larger groups that were highly patriarchal and patrilineal, and in which prestige and status were conferred on heroic males and their exploits, and on one’s proximity to their patrilines. Heroic exploits that benefit people who are not close relatives while conferring extra status on close relatives ensure that such altruistic behaviors persist and aren’t burned out benefiting people who aren’t close relatives. Such genes and cultures may have decreased as you go south and east because historically there have been larger panmictic populations there that as Hamilton notes, tend to burn out such behaviors.

Ancient DNA from the steppe has shown us Ukrainians and other East Slavs are genetically as close to suspected Proto-Indo-Europeans as any Northwest European, but like non-Indo-European North Caucasians they are firmly on the other side of the Hajnal line.

The Hajnal line also separates Ireland from Britain, despite the fact that the Irish and British cluster together genetically and are closer relative to other Europeans. The line just marks differences in average age of marriage.

I do consider Ireland very much a part of Northwest Europe, I just question the possibility that some proto-Indo-European inherited traits would be responsible for the present success of Northwest Europe when groups like Ukrainians are equally close to PIE steppe groups genetically - one could also say that corruption and clannishness result from kin-based selection in highly patriarchal groups. North Italians are successful on the same metrics as Northwest Europeans but genetically are clearly more distant from Indo-Europeans than they or East Slavs are.

If you don’t blog here I would hope that you would continue your bloggin elsewhere as I find what you have to say very enlightening.

I agree.

Me too. Peter Frost has lots of interesting ideas, and I especially appreciate how he interprets historical and contemporary social trends in light of anthropological and ethnographic data –whether it’s flattering or not.

The Hajnal line also separates Ireland from Britain, despite the fact that the Irish and British cluster together genetically and are closer relative to other Europeans. The line just marks differences in average age of marriage.

I do consider Ireland very much a part of Northwest Europe, I just question the possibility that some proto-Indo-European inherited traits would be responsible for the present success of Northwest Europe when groups like Ukrainians are equally close to PIE steppe groups genetically – one could also say that corruption and clannishness result from kin-based selection in highly patriarchal groups. North Italians are successful on the same metrics as Northwest Europeans but genetically are clearly more distant from Indo-Europeans than they or East Slavs are.

Now I understand why you so often set up issues and arguments based on socio-biological (scientific) facts … and then opt NOT to draw the obvious conclusions: the fear of being accused and convicted of so-called “hate” crimes.

That’s okay. If it helps, I believe that I can speak for myself and others that we, your appreciative audience, can read between the lines and draw the conclusions ourselves, just as people have had to do throughout the ages when living in totalitarian states.

Even though the Western world (now sadly including Canada) is falling into a liberal totalitarianism … when facts are inconsistent with public policy, make it illegal to discuss them … please continue what you are doing. I’m sure I’m not the only one who takes your brilliant analyses and mulls over them for weeks at a time. They rock my world, providing new structures for understanding the world in which we live.

Love your neighbor as you love yourself in not a command – it is a guide.

Many people have trouble making that distinction. Once you create a desired social norm, the mechanisms of social conformity will cause people to enforce that norm.

Group A and B are in conflict. They can be distinguished genetically. Group A kills all of group B. Group B leaves no descendants. The genetic material that group A possesses survives and leaves descendants.

That seldom happens. Typically, Group A kills or enslaves all of the men of Group B, and keeps their women as wives and concubines. Those wives will have kids with Group A men.

A second problem is that a high rate of group fission is necessary to make your model work. If the rate of fission is too low, you will need an impossibly long period of time to bring altruistic traits to fixation. This is why I prefer the haystack model, since new social groups are created and dissolved on a yearly basis.

You need to come back to the US. I think you said you were here when you were young.

I have never lived in the U.S. As a child I lived in Scarborough, Ontario and then in Pefferlaw, Ontario.

I’ve seen no reason to conclude psychopathy was more useful in the past than it is now.

There was a period from the 1920s to the late 1960s when “cads” were having a lot more children than “dads.” This was the conclusion of Jason Malloy and JayMan (2012) when they looked at General Social Survey data.

JayMan. (2012). Some guys get all the babes – not exactly, JayMan’s Blog, November 8

Before that time, “cads” did less well. Their numbers were contained. But there’s no way to exclude them entirely from the gene pool, at least not in a large, complex society. When their reproductive strategy does work, it pays off big time.

Heroic exploits that benefit people who are not close relatives while conferring extra status on close relatives ensure that such altruistic behaviors persist and aren’t burned out benefiting people who aren’t close relatives.

This is standard kin selection theory, and it applies to all humans, not just some. The various Amerindian peoples were very heroic, but their heroism created a high-trust environment only among close kin. Extending that high-trust environment to a large, complex society was a challenge and was achieved in ways that were very different from what we see in Northwest Europeans (cf. the Aztecs and the Incas).

Mental traits like affective empathy and guilt proneness are difficult to extend beyond the family unit and over large numbers of people who are not closely related. I’m not a mathematical genius, but I don’t see how kin selection can drive that sort of evolutionary model.

Now I understand why you so often set up issues and arguments based on socio-biological (scientific) facts … and then opt NOT to draw the obvious conclusions: the fear of being accused and convicted of so-called “hate” crimes.

Not exactly. In Canada, human rights commissions have become quasi-judicial bodies with police powers. Like the police, they prefer to go after “soft targets.” It’s like the police officer who hands out speeding tickets to little old ladies on Sunday morning, as opposed to going into a tough neighborhood.

For our human rights commissions, a soft target is a blog that features long, rambling comments about “niggers,” “homos,” and “Jews, Jews, Jews.” That’s a slam-dunk prosecution.

No one wants a court trial that may turn out badly for their side. In that case, the tables can be turned, especially if the prosecution is trying to get a conviction under a controversial law. This was the case with Philippe Rushton. After a while, he gained a certain immunity from prosecution because he was too articulate, too calm, and too scholarly. The Ontario premier and the Ontario Provincial Police tried to make him look like a nut case … and finally gave up.

Love your neighbor as you love yourself in not a command – it is a guide.

Many people have trouble making that distinction. Once you create a desired social norm, the mechanisms of social conformity will cause people to enforce that norm.

We need each other. Most people need a set of norms to live by – what could be better than a set of none coercive volitional ideals to organize ourselves? What is wrong with being hopeful, protecting life, love, truth, and forgiving --- you cannot have freedom without these things. Is there any system of thought that is currently better?

There are always pockets of none conformity – move to a big city – go into space -- build a new better norm. There is nothing to fear.

This is standard kin selection theory, and it applies to all humans, not just some. The various Amerindian peoples were very heroic, but their heroism created a high-trust environment only among close kin. Extending that high-trust environment to a large, complex society was a challenge and was achieved in ways that were very different from what we see in Northwest Europeans (cf. the Aztecs and the Incas).

It doesn't just apply to humans, but to animals as well, and it remains the best explanation for the altruism we observe in the natural world. The Amerindians were a varied group spanning a huge range of latitudes from the Arctic to the equatorial region where the Aztecs and Incas developed. I'm not sure why you're citing the Aztecs and Incas as representative. Caucasoids range from NW Europe and Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, North Africa, Middle East, SW Asia, etc., and you would not cite those latter regions as representative of the former or the whole.

There was a period from the 1920s to the late 1960s when “cads” were having a lot more children than “dads.” This was the conclusion of Jason Malloy and JayMan (2012) when they looked at General Social Survey data.

Where do you get this? Jayman (2012) says, "In virtually every generation, faithful men reliably outbreed more promiscuous ones."

[Some "adaptation": these days, psychopaths can't even get laid enough to replace themselves, and whatever is said, this is the way it was throughout history. (Even if there was short divergent spell, which I don't see.)]

I read the Harpending piece, and he too ignores proving an adaptational advantage to psychpathy. My guess is that, like Jayman and probably you, they ignore the likelihood that there's a golden mean in level of psychopathy. [Puritans like Frost might be insufficiently psychopathic.]

Group A kills or enslaves all of the men of Group B, and keeps their women as wives and concubines. Those wives will have kids with Group A men.

It is my understanding that the % of genetic material that is transmitted from an ancestor to one individual varies by chromosome and whether it comes from the female ancestor or the male ancestor.

My point is that I don't see how we could rule out the fact that the male is from one genetic group and the female is from another might make a difference. (I am over my head with the genetics, so I will say this: male parent from group A and female parent from group B is not the same as male parent from group B and female parent from group A, especially extended for generations.)

Love your neighbor as you love yourself in not a command – it is a guide.

Many people have trouble making that distinction. Once you create a desired social norm, the mechanisms of social conformity will cause people to enforce that norm.

Group A and B are in conflict. They can be distinguished genetically. Group A kills all of group B. Group B leaves no descendants. The genetic material that group A possesses survives and leaves descendants.

That seldom happens. Typically, Group A kills or enslaves all of the men of Group B, and keeps their women as wives and concubines. Those wives will have kids with Group A men.

A second problem is that a high rate of group fission is necessary to make your model work. If the rate of fission is too low, you will need an impossibly long period of time to bring altruistic traits to fixation. This is why I prefer the haystack model, since new social groups are created and dissolved on a yearly basis.

You need to come back to the US. I think you said you were here when you were young.

I have never lived in the U.S. As a child I lived in Scarborough, Ontario and then in Pefferlaw, Ontario.

I’ve seen no reason to conclude psychopathy was more useful in the past than it is now.

There was a period from the 1920s to the late 1960s when "cads" were having a lot more children than "dads." This was the conclusion of Jason Malloy and JayMan (2012) when they looked at General Social Survey data.

JayMan. (2012). Some guys get all the babes - not exactly, JayMan's Blog, November 8
http://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/some-guys-get-all-the-babes-not-exactly/

Before that time, "cads" did less well. Their numbers were contained. But there's no way to exclude them entirely from the gene pool, at least not in a large, complex society. When their reproductive strategy does work, it pays off big time.

Heroic exploits that benefit people who are not close relatives while conferring extra status on close relatives ensure that such altruistic behaviors persist and aren’t burned out benefiting people who aren’t close relatives.

This is standard kin selection theory, and it applies to all humans, not just some. The various Amerindian peoples were very heroic, but their heroism created a high-trust environment only among close kin. Extending that high-trust environment to a large, complex society was a challenge and was achieved in ways that were very different from what we see in Northwest Europeans (cf. the Aztecs and the Incas).

Mental traits like affective empathy and guilt proneness are difficult to extend beyond the family unit and over large numbers of people who are not closely related. I'm not a mathematical genius, but I don't see how kin selection can drive that sort of evolutionary model.

Now I understand why you so often set up issues and arguments based on socio-biological (scientific) facts … and then opt NOT to draw the obvious conclusions: the fear of being accused and convicted of so-called “hate” crimes.

Not exactly. In Canada, human rights commissions have become quasi-judicial bodies with police powers. Like the police, they prefer to go after "soft targets." It's like the police officer who hands out speeding tickets to little old ladies on Sunday morning, as opposed to going into a tough neighborhood.

For our human rights commissions, a soft target is a blog that features long, rambling comments about "niggers," "homos," and "Jews, Jews, Jews." That's a slam-dunk prosecution.

No one wants a court trial that may turn out badly for their side. In that case, the tables can be turned, especially if the prosecution is trying to get a conviction under a controversial law. This was the case with Philippe Rushton. After a while, he gained a certain immunity from prosecution because he was too articulate, too calm, and too scholarly. The Ontario premier and the Ontario Provincial Police tried to make him look like a nut case ... and finally gave up.

Love your neighbor as you love yourself in not a command – it is a guide.

Many people have trouble making that distinction. Once you create a desired social norm, the mechanisms of social conformity will cause people to enforce that norm.

We need each other. Most people need a set of norms to live by – what could be better than a set of none coercive volitional ideals to organize ourselves? What is wrong with being hopeful, protecting life, love, truth, and forgiving — you cannot have freedom without these things. Is there any system of thought that is currently better?

There are always pockets of none conformity – move to a big city – go into space — build a new better norm. There is nothing to fear.

What if you give, but the recipient decides it's "not enough"?Do they have the right to just TAKE what they believe is their share?Do you have the "right" to defend YOUR property? Why or why not?Can you kill your burglar/thief? Why or why not?Will you get in trouble when you DO kill a thief or attacker, like in some of America's high-profile cases?

There IS something to fear, anything from public demonization, to the State coming down on you for defending yourself, your family, your property!

This is why we have very little charity anymore, and a HUGE Welfare State.Foreign parasites prefer this way, because charities would keep their limited resources out of enemy hands, while Welfare State have the power of infinite taxation, so they don't mind subsidizing the enemies of the taxpayers!

Love your neighbor as you love yourself in not a command – it is a guide.

Many people have trouble making that distinction. Once you create a desired social norm, the mechanisms of social conformity will cause people to enforce that norm.

We need each other. Most people need a set of norms to live by – what could be better than a set of none coercive volitional ideals to organize ourselves? What is wrong with being hopeful, protecting life, love, truth, and forgiving --- you cannot have freedom without these things. Is there any system of thought that is currently better?

There are always pockets of none conformity – move to a big city – go into space -- build a new better norm. There is nothing to fear.

What if you give, but the recipient decides it’s “not enough”?
Do they have the right to just TAKE what they believe is their share?
Do you have the “right” to defend YOUR property? Why or why not?
Can you kill your burglar/thief? Why or why not?
Will you get in trouble when you DO kill a thief or attacker, like in some of America’s high-profile cases?

There IS something to fear, anything from public demonization, to the State coming down on you for defending yourself, your family, your property!

This is why we have very little charity anymore, and a HUGE Welfare State.
Foreign parasites prefer this way, because charities would keep their limited resources out of enemy hands, while Welfare State have the power of infinite taxation, so they don’t mind subsidizing the enemies of the taxpayers!

Love your neighbor as you love yourself in not a command – it is a guide.

Many people have trouble making that distinction. Once you create a desired social norm, the mechanisms of social conformity will cause people to enforce that norm.

Group A and B are in conflict. They can be distinguished genetically. Group A kills all of group B. Group B leaves no descendants. The genetic material that group A possesses survives and leaves descendants.

That seldom happens. Typically, Group A kills or enslaves all of the men of Group B, and keeps their women as wives and concubines. Those wives will have kids with Group A men.

A second problem is that a high rate of group fission is necessary to make your model work. If the rate of fission is too low, you will need an impossibly long period of time to bring altruistic traits to fixation. This is why I prefer the haystack model, since new social groups are created and dissolved on a yearly basis.

You need to come back to the US. I think you said you were here when you were young.

I have never lived in the U.S. As a child I lived in Scarborough, Ontario and then in Pefferlaw, Ontario.

I’ve seen no reason to conclude psychopathy was more useful in the past than it is now.

There was a period from the 1920s to the late 1960s when "cads" were having a lot more children than "dads." This was the conclusion of Jason Malloy and JayMan (2012) when they looked at General Social Survey data.

JayMan. (2012). Some guys get all the babes - not exactly, JayMan's Blog, November 8
http://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/some-guys-get-all-the-babes-not-exactly/

Before that time, "cads" did less well. Their numbers were contained. But there's no way to exclude them entirely from the gene pool, at least not in a large, complex society. When their reproductive strategy does work, it pays off big time.

Heroic exploits that benefit people who are not close relatives while conferring extra status on close relatives ensure that such altruistic behaviors persist and aren’t burned out benefiting people who aren’t close relatives.

This is standard kin selection theory, and it applies to all humans, not just some. The various Amerindian peoples were very heroic, but their heroism created a high-trust environment only among close kin. Extending that high-trust environment to a large, complex society was a challenge and was achieved in ways that were very different from what we see in Northwest Europeans (cf. the Aztecs and the Incas).

Mental traits like affective empathy and guilt proneness are difficult to extend beyond the family unit and over large numbers of people who are not closely related. I'm not a mathematical genius, but I don't see how kin selection can drive that sort of evolutionary model.

Now I understand why you so often set up issues and arguments based on socio-biological (scientific) facts … and then opt NOT to draw the obvious conclusions: the fear of being accused and convicted of so-called “hate” crimes.

Not exactly. In Canada, human rights commissions have become quasi-judicial bodies with police powers. Like the police, they prefer to go after "soft targets." It's like the police officer who hands out speeding tickets to little old ladies on Sunday morning, as opposed to going into a tough neighborhood.

For our human rights commissions, a soft target is a blog that features long, rambling comments about "niggers," "homos," and "Jews, Jews, Jews." That's a slam-dunk prosecution.

No one wants a court trial that may turn out badly for their side. In that case, the tables can be turned, especially if the prosecution is trying to get a conviction under a controversial law. This was the case with Philippe Rushton. After a while, he gained a certain immunity from prosecution because he was too articulate, too calm, and too scholarly. The Ontario premier and the Ontario Provincial Police tried to make him look like a nut case ... and finally gave up.

This is standard kin selection theory, and it applies to all humans, not just some. The various Amerindian peoples were very heroic, but their heroism created a high-trust environment only among close kin. Extending that high-trust environment to a large, complex society was a challenge and was achieved in ways that were very different from what we see in Northwest Europeans (cf. the Aztecs and the Incas).

It doesn’t just apply to humans, but to animals as well, and it remains the best explanation for the altruism we observe in the natural world. The Amerindians were a varied group spanning a huge range of latitudes from the Arctic to the equatorial region where the Aztecs and Incas developed. I’m not sure why you’re citing the Aztecs and Incas as representative. Caucasoids range from NW Europe and Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, North Africa, Middle East, SW Asia, etc., and you would not cite those latter regions as representative of the former or the whole.

IE languages are more dominant in Europe. It’s not clear at all that their impact would have decreased linearly farther north and west, and many argue the opposite.

Actually, most linguists argue that the linguistic imprint of Indo-European decreases as one moves north and west. The Germanic languages seem to be the result of an interaction between Indo-European and a pre-Indo-European substrate (see Grimm's Law).

As Hamilton writes, we know how altruism can be selected by patriarchal warrior cultures

Please explain to me how altruism would be favored in that model. Take my hand and walk me through your logic. Yes, I'm familiar with Hamilton's work, and this is one case where he was widely ridiculed by his peers.

Group selection is very controversial. There are only a limited number of models (kin selection in small bands and the haystack model) which can make it work.

Do you need a safe space? (I’m glad you lack this power, in the interest of ideals of free speech.) Before it was fear of prosecution for thought crimes. Now it’s what?

Abusive language isn't conducive to intelligent debate. I'm not a libertarian, so please don't try to shame me into complying with libertarian ideals. As for Steve Sailer and Anatoly Karliln, they regularly delete many comments.

I made a decision to continue with my postings until the end of this month. If the situation doesn't improve, I won't continue in the new year.

Abusive language isn’t conducive to intelligent debate. I’m not a libertarian, so please don’t try to shame me into complying with libertarian ideals.

Actually, what I was shaming you about is your previous pretension to fear prosecution.

So what if it’s not conducive? It doesn’t by any means preclude it. People can ignore insults or respond while addressing primarily content. You’re a Puritan who doesn’t understand the difference. That’s why you should never moderate a discussion – or pollute it with your trying to shame others into expressing themselves in your manner.

On being libertarian – you can sure whine about the illiberalism of students to fool someone.

Love your neighbor as you love yourself in not a command – it is a guide.

Many people have trouble making that distinction. Once you create a desired social norm, the mechanisms of social conformity will cause people to enforce that norm.

Group A and B are in conflict. They can be distinguished genetically. Group A kills all of group B. Group B leaves no descendants. The genetic material that group A possesses survives and leaves descendants.

That seldom happens. Typically, Group A kills or enslaves all of the men of Group B, and keeps their women as wives and concubines. Those wives will have kids with Group A men.

A second problem is that a high rate of group fission is necessary to make your model work. If the rate of fission is too low, you will need an impossibly long period of time to bring altruistic traits to fixation. This is why I prefer the haystack model, since new social groups are created and dissolved on a yearly basis.

You need to come back to the US. I think you said you were here when you were young.

I have never lived in the U.S. As a child I lived in Scarborough, Ontario and then in Pefferlaw, Ontario.

I’ve seen no reason to conclude psychopathy was more useful in the past than it is now.

There was a period from the 1920s to the late 1960s when "cads" were having a lot more children than "dads." This was the conclusion of Jason Malloy and JayMan (2012) when they looked at General Social Survey data.

JayMan. (2012). Some guys get all the babes - not exactly, JayMan's Blog, November 8
http://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/some-guys-get-all-the-babes-not-exactly/

Before that time, "cads" did less well. Their numbers were contained. But there's no way to exclude them entirely from the gene pool, at least not in a large, complex society. When their reproductive strategy does work, it pays off big time.

Heroic exploits that benefit people who are not close relatives while conferring extra status on close relatives ensure that such altruistic behaviors persist and aren’t burned out benefiting people who aren’t close relatives.

This is standard kin selection theory, and it applies to all humans, not just some. The various Amerindian peoples were very heroic, but their heroism created a high-trust environment only among close kin. Extending that high-trust environment to a large, complex society was a challenge and was achieved in ways that were very different from what we see in Northwest Europeans (cf. the Aztecs and the Incas).

Mental traits like affective empathy and guilt proneness are difficult to extend beyond the family unit and over large numbers of people who are not closely related. I'm not a mathematical genius, but I don't see how kin selection can drive that sort of evolutionary model.

Now I understand why you so often set up issues and arguments based on socio-biological (scientific) facts … and then opt NOT to draw the obvious conclusions: the fear of being accused and convicted of so-called “hate” crimes.

Not exactly. In Canada, human rights commissions have become quasi-judicial bodies with police powers. Like the police, they prefer to go after "soft targets." It's like the police officer who hands out speeding tickets to little old ladies on Sunday morning, as opposed to going into a tough neighborhood.

For our human rights commissions, a soft target is a blog that features long, rambling comments about "niggers," "homos," and "Jews, Jews, Jews." That's a slam-dunk prosecution.

No one wants a court trial that may turn out badly for their side. In that case, the tables can be turned, especially if the prosecution is trying to get a conviction under a controversial law. This was the case with Philippe Rushton. After a while, he gained a certain immunity from prosecution because he was too articulate, too calm, and too scholarly. The Ontario premier and the Ontario Provincial Police tried to make him look like a nut case ... and finally gave up.

There was a period from the 1920s to the late 1960s when “cads” were having a lot more children than “dads.” This was the conclusion of Jason Malloy and JayMan (2012) when they looked at General Social Survey data.

Where do you get this? Jayman (2012) says, “In virtually every generation, faithful men reliably outbreed more promiscuous ones.”

[Some "adaptation": these days, psychopaths can't even get laid enough to replace themselves, and whatever is said, this is the way it was throughout history. (Even if there was short divergent spell, which I don't see.)]

I read the Harpending piece, and he too ignores proving an adaptational advantage to psychpathy. My guess is that, like Jayman and probably you, they ignore the likelihood that there’s a golden mean in level of psychopathy. [Puritans like Frost might be insufficiently psychopathic.]

Why do the best discussions occur, as in Karlin or Sailer, where no effort is made to suppress or discourage posters because the moderator doesn’t like the way they express their opinions?

Steve Sailer suppresses my comments all the fricking time; and, what's more, there isn't even a reason for it. I have not insulted or threatened anybody, I say nothing in a combative tone, and everything I write is on topic and as relevant as I can make it--so much so that I often see other Unz writers echoing my thoughts a day or a week after I wrote them.

But none of this is ever allowed through on Sailer's blog. I think he just likes to maintain a certain circle-jerk atmosphere typical of condescending, 50-ish, SWPL types latterly converted to HBD as a means of easing their frustrations with life.

There are always pockets of none conformity – move to a big city – go into space — build a new better norm. There is nothing to fear.

Pockets of non-conformity can easily be overwhelmed, especially if they are vilified. That is something to fear.

it remains the best explanation for the altruism we observe in the natural world

Kin selection doesn’t explain altruistic behavior toward people who are not close kin.

I’m not sure why you’re citing the Aztecs and Incas as representative.

They are representative of Amerindian people who have developed large, complex societies. There were also groups along the Mississippi who were trending in that direction as well.

Caucasoids range from NW Europe and Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, North Africa, Middle East, SW Asia, etc., and you would not cite those latter regions as representative of the former or the whole.

Northwest Europeans followed a path toward large, complex societies that is different in certain ways from what we see in the Middle East … or in much of the world, for that matter.

Actually, what I was shaming you about is your previous pretension to fear prosecution.

I don’t fear being prosecuted for stupid things I write. I can defend my beliefs in a courtroom, if need be. But I fear being prosecuted for stupid things that others write.

So what if it’s not conducive? It doesn’t by any means preclude it.

It degrades the quality of debate. It also makes it harder to find common ground. People start to attack each other not because of any real disagreement but because they hate each other.

That’s why you should never moderate a discussion – or pollute it with your trying to shame others into expressing themselves in your manner.

I wouldn’t shame them. I would just hit “delete.” After a while they would get the message. It’s called dog training.

On being libertarian – you can sure whine about the illiberalism of students to fool someone.

I believe in free societies, but I don’t believe they can simply be willed into being. They require a certain social, cultural, and psychological context.

Where do you get this? Jayman (2012) says, “In virtually every generation, faithful men reliably outbreed more promiscuous ones.”

Perhaps you should look at the chart, which is located only two lines above that quote. For the cohorts born between 1920 and 1939, the men who had children by one woman were not the ones who had the most kids. For the cohorts born between 1940 and 1959, the men who had children by one woman were almost tied for first place with men who had two to three female sex partners. It is only in younger cohorts that “dads” have really had the upper hand over “cads.”

For the cohorts born between 1920 and 1939, the men who had children by one woman were not the ones who had the most kids. For the cohorts born between 1940 and 1959, the men who had children by one woman were almost tied for first place with men who had two to three female sex partners

Looking at the charts, my conclusion was the same as Jayman's, which I quoted. Two or three sexual partners a psychopath does not make. The true cads consistently did worse reproductively.

As I said, the data prove my point. In some cohorts multiple sexual partners - but not many sexual partners - reproduce more. As I said (and you have failed to address) the effect of psychopathy on fitness is curvilinear. (We may operationalize degree of psychopathy by number of partners.) Those at either extreme of this dimension have a disorder. [This isn't to say that having a single partner is disordered. A single sexual partner does not exclude some degree of psychopathy, defined as a dimension.]

There are always pockets of none conformity – move to a big city – go into space — build a new better norm. There is nothing to fear.

Pockets of non-conformity can easily be overwhelmed, especially if they are vilified. That is something to fear.

it remains the best explanation for the altruism we observe in the natural world

Kin selection doesn't explain altruistic behavior toward people who are not close kin.

I’m not sure why you’re citing the Aztecs and Incas as representative.

They are representative of Amerindian people who have developed large, complex societies. There were also groups along the Mississippi who were trending in that direction as well.

Caucasoids range from NW Europe and Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, North Africa, Middle East, SW Asia, etc., and you would not cite those latter regions as representative of the former or the whole.

Northwest Europeans followed a path toward large, complex societies that is different in certain ways from what we see in the Middle East ... or in much of the world, for that matter.

Actually, what I was shaming you about is your previous pretension to fear prosecution.

I don't fear being prosecuted for stupid things I write. I can defend my beliefs in a courtroom, if need be. But I fear being prosecuted for stupid things that others write.

So what if it’s not conducive? It doesn’t by any means preclude it.

It degrades the quality of debate. It also makes it harder to find common ground. People start to attack each other not because of any real disagreement but because they hate each other.

That’s why you should never moderate a discussion – or pollute it with your trying to shame others into expressing themselves in your manner.

I wouldn't shame them. I would just hit "delete." After a while they would get the message. It's called dog training.

On being libertarian – you can sure whine about the illiberalism of students to fool someone.

I believe in free societies, but I don't believe they can simply be willed into being. They require a certain social, cultural, and psychological context.

Where do you get this? Jayman (2012) says, “In virtually every generation, faithful men reliably outbreed more promiscuous ones.”

Perhaps you should look at the chart, which is located only two lines above that quote. For the cohorts born between 1920 and 1939, the men who had children by one woman were not the ones who had the most kids. For the cohorts born between 1940 and 1959, the men who had children by one woman were almost tied for first place with men who had two to three female sex partners. It is only in younger cohorts that "dads" have really had the upper hand over "cads."

For the cohorts born between 1920 and 1939, the men who had children by one woman were not the ones who had the most kids. For the cohorts born between 1940 and 1959, the men who had children by one woman were almost tied for first place with men who had two to three female sex partners

Looking at the charts, my conclusion was the same as Jayman’s, which I quoted. Two or three sexual partners a psychopath does not make. The true cads consistently did worse reproductively.

As I said, the data prove my point. In some cohorts multiple sexual partners – but not many sexual partners – reproduce more. As I said (and you have failed to address) the effect of psychopathy on fitness is curvilinear. (We may operationalize degree of psychopathy by number of partners.) Those at either extreme of this dimension have a disorder. [This isn't to say that having a single partner is disordered. A single sexual partner does not exclude some degree of psychopathy, defined as a dimension.]

Yes, but on the other hand in a primitive society dependent mostly on hunting the survival of a women and her children is totally dependent on the willingness and ability of her mate to provide food. An Eskimo women who choose a mate for her children who was either unwilling or unable to provide her with food was doomed as soon as winter arrived.

Traditional Inuit society was almost totally communalistic (at least the Canadian Inuit). Not only was all food shared in common (by necessity,) the women practically were, too. A man who wouldn’t share food with others in his tribe (wife and children included) is unthinkable–a total violation of tribal norms. A man who couldn’t hunt would be supported by the tribe, die of hunger, or commit suicide. At any rate, his wife would be unlikely to suffer too much, as she would be sleeping with several other men, who of course would bring home plenty of good seal to share with the entire tribe.

Love your neighbor as you love yourself in not a command – it is a guide.

Many people have trouble making that distinction. Once you create a desired social norm, the mechanisms of social conformity will cause people to enforce that norm.

Group A and B are in conflict. They can be distinguished genetically. Group A kills all of group B. Group B leaves no descendants. The genetic material that group A possesses survives and leaves descendants.

That seldom happens. Typically, Group A kills or enslaves all of the men of Group B, and keeps their women as wives and concubines. Those wives will have kids with Group A men.

A second problem is that a high rate of group fission is necessary to make your model work. If the rate of fission is too low, you will need an impossibly long period of time to bring altruistic traits to fixation. This is why I prefer the haystack model, since new social groups are created and dissolved on a yearly basis.

You need to come back to the US. I think you said you were here when you were young.

I have never lived in the U.S. As a child I lived in Scarborough, Ontario and then in Pefferlaw, Ontario.

I’ve seen no reason to conclude psychopathy was more useful in the past than it is now.

There was a period from the 1920s to the late 1960s when "cads" were having a lot more children than "dads." This was the conclusion of Jason Malloy and JayMan (2012) when they looked at General Social Survey data.

JayMan. (2012). Some guys get all the babes - not exactly, JayMan's Blog, November 8
http://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/some-guys-get-all-the-babes-not-exactly/

Before that time, "cads" did less well. Their numbers were contained. But there's no way to exclude them entirely from the gene pool, at least not in a large, complex society. When their reproductive strategy does work, it pays off big time.

Heroic exploits that benefit people who are not close relatives while conferring extra status on close relatives ensure that such altruistic behaviors persist and aren’t burned out benefiting people who aren’t close relatives.

This is standard kin selection theory, and it applies to all humans, not just some. The various Amerindian peoples were very heroic, but their heroism created a high-trust environment only among close kin. Extending that high-trust environment to a large, complex society was a challenge and was achieved in ways that were very different from what we see in Northwest Europeans (cf. the Aztecs and the Incas).

Mental traits like affective empathy and guilt proneness are difficult to extend beyond the family unit and over large numbers of people who are not closely related. I'm not a mathematical genius, but I don't see how kin selection can drive that sort of evolutionary model.

Now I understand why you so often set up issues and arguments based on socio-biological (scientific) facts … and then opt NOT to draw the obvious conclusions: the fear of being accused and convicted of so-called “hate” crimes.

Not exactly. In Canada, human rights commissions have become quasi-judicial bodies with police powers. Like the police, they prefer to go after "soft targets." It's like the police officer who hands out speeding tickets to little old ladies on Sunday morning, as opposed to going into a tough neighborhood.

For our human rights commissions, a soft target is a blog that features long, rambling comments about "niggers," "homos," and "Jews, Jews, Jews." That's a slam-dunk prosecution.

No one wants a court trial that may turn out badly for their side. In that case, the tables can be turned, especially if the prosecution is trying to get a conviction under a controversial law. This was the case with Philippe Rushton. After a while, he gained a certain immunity from prosecution because he was too articulate, too calm, and too scholarly. The Ontario premier and the Ontario Provincial Police tried to make him look like a nut case ... and finally gave up.

Group A kills or enslaves all of the men of Group B, and keeps their women as wives and concubines. Those wives will have kids with Group A men.

It is my understanding that the % of genetic material that is transmitted from an ancestor to one individual varies by chromosome and whether it comes from the female ancestor or the male ancestor.

My point is that I don’t see how we could rule out the fact that the male is from one genetic group and the female is from another might make a difference. (I am over my head with the genetics, so I will say this: male parent from group A and female parent from group B is not the same as male parent from group B and female parent from group A, especially extended for generations.)

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It's silly to fixate on the CERD. The CERD is just part and parcel of Koreans deciding they don't have to take any crap. CERD comes with the ICCPR, which is your real problem.
The Cheju massacre, US puppet ruler Syngman Rhee, US operational authority over the armed forces until 1949, the North...